Describing the way Imagine Dragons sounds is basically encapsulating popular music as a whole in 2018. Hip-hop runs in its veins, like it does in most aspects of our culture, dictating the way frontman Dan Reynolds delivers his verses even if his rhythms feels more like subconscious embedding than an overt choice. There are vague nods to electronic music that give the songs a chaotic texture while imbuing them with futuristic, or at least contemporary, flare. There’s pop music gloss that makes their sound a perfect fit for streaming, radio, and approximately 25% of all movie trailers released in the last five years. And, of course, there is the rock music core, that the band holds onto like the last bastions on a dying planet, entrenched in a fight where relevance and audience are hardly guaranteed. And the weirdest part? They’re winning. The first time I heard an Imagine Dragons song, though, my impression was quite different. I was driving to pick up a friend from LAX and “Demons” came on the radio. Imagine Dragons has already had a string of hits that somehow had escaped my immediate knowledge, but “Demons” immediately struck me as something that I rarely heard in commercial music. It sounded, well, Christian. Maybe it was the titular reference and bits about “kingdom come,” “sinners,” and “hell.” Naturally, as someone who stopped going to church regularly in 8th grade, I hated it. Clearly, I wasn’t alone. Even from their earliest brushes with success, perhaps no contemporary musical project has been reviled to such an extent as Imagine Dragons. For every meekly flattering (though masterfully written) semi-defense of Imagine Dragons there are countless forums, threads, and reviews that would gleefully cast the band into its own smoldering breath. Their debut album, 2012’s Night Visions, didn’t receive a ton of mainstream reviews despite the fact that the band already had a hit on the Billboard Hot 100 (“It’s Time”) ahead of its release and wound up selling a whopping 83,000 first week sales, making it the best selling debut since 2006. But when the band followed it up with 2015’s Smoke + Mirrors, the critics showed up with their guns blazing. In his two-star review for Rolling Stone, Jon Dolan said “being mildly inventive isn’t the same as being good, and Imagine Dragons hone all that eclectic energy into dreary anthems that aren’t much better than the flaming turds Creed used to light up on our collective doorstep back in the Nineties.” The Guardian called it “flat-packed stadium pop at its most anonymous” while The Los Angeles Times noted that “There are moments where Imagine Dragons sounds so downright lame… that you simply can’t believe Reynolds is working to impress anyone but himself.” By the time last year’s Evolve was released, mild disgust turned to straight viciousness, even as the band desperately had to prove that they could regain the status they achieved with Night Visions. Holding a staggeringly low 47 on Metacritic, Evolve was met with The Guardian noting “they remain faceless — something which is only likely to continue as they channel an on-trend, electronic sound for this third outing.”

In an even bigger statement, Pitchfork doesn’t even have an artist page for the band, only writing about them on the off-chance they collaborate with Kendrick Lamar or Josh Homme goes on a profanity-laced tirade about them in concert. This is the way that much of music media treats Imagine Dragons, as either a punchline or a nuisance they can ignore, like a housefly that harmlessly buzzes around for a day or two before retreating from memory. But like many of the biggest pop stars throughout history, critical ambivalence and derision has not really hurt Imagine Dragons. In a time when Twenty One Pilots and Portugal, The Man are their only alternative rock contemporaries crossing over onto the pop charts, Imagine Dragons are the only ones yet that have done it across multiple albums. Over the course of just six years, they’ve become the torchbearers for a genre that is essentially on life support. But many forget that even Imagine Dragons bungled their big follow-up. After “It’s Time,” “Radioactive,” and “Demons” all made major impression on the Hot 100, their sophomore album had to be considered a flop despite debuting at No. 1 and going platinum. “I Bet My Life” certainly made a mark in both the pop and rock worlds, but the band did not seem nearly as omnipresent and the album ultimately felt a bit more scattered in their sound. Evolve has rebounded tremendously, with “Believer,” “Thunder,” and “Whatever It Takes” nearly matching the ubiquity of the three singles from their debut effort. This renewed success came at a time when another lackluster effort would have certainly doomed the band to become more of a historical footnote. Instead, Imagine Dragons became one of the biggest bands in the world. But while their success is impressive, much like being “mildly inventive,” it does not mean Imagine Dragons are good. And neither does their influence. Still, it feels important to note just how much of the Imagine Dragons sound has taken over their genre. It’s impossible to turn on the radio without hearing at least a shadow of the band, be it Bishop Briggs or X Ambassadors or Bastille or Judah And The Lion. Even bands that had emerged long before them, like Fall Out Boy and Panic! At The Disco, have taken up the Imagine Dragons torch, leaning into chanting arena-ready choruses and tacking on indulgent percussion. Theirs is the kind of influence that’s easy to deride, but it still fits firmly in the alternative narrative. Funnily enough, Imagine Dragons’ first hit was a direct descendant of the new Americana spawned by Mumford & Sons’ and their many stomp-clap imitators, and their triumph remains the best counterargument to anyone who claims that the Mumfords don’t have a lasting pop music footprint. A little mandolin goes a long way. Or, here’s another way to look at it. In my twenty-five years or so of following alternative rock, I’ve thought virtually every new trend was the worst. Whether it was the pop-punk of Blink-182 and the rap-rock fusion that nu-metal provided to supplant grunge, or the Radiohead-lite of Coldplay, or the sequenced indie rock for stadiums of The Killers, or the Hot Topic screamo of My Chemical Romance, or the glow-in-the-dark bravado of Muse, or the old-timey schtick of the Mumfords — every new trend in the genre felt decidedly worse than the one that preceded it. But likewise, time found my stance on each softening, some of them took a decade to make me an actual fan, and in other areas, it just took admitting to an undisputable jam or two. Whatever is next for alternative rock will surely be worse than Imagine Dragons, and will surely make more sense the longer we have to live with it. It’s easy to root for our small independent music to be innovative because the stakes are so low, but when innovations are made at the largest scale, warts and all, the masses have a much harder time keeping pace.