Las Vegas quartet Imagine Dragons have come a long way since the days in 2010, when they played four hours a night at casinos for $100 a member. “Many times we’d be there at 3 in the morning and the room would be almost empty,” guitarist and songwriter Daniel Wayne Sermon tells Yahoo Music. “Drunk people spilled beer on us while we played and yelled ‘Free Bird’ every 30 minutes. Remembering those days kind of makes us appreciate the success we’ve had.”

Most bands would sacrifice their drummer for the kind of success Imagine Dragons have had. The group’s second full-length Smoke + Mirrors debuted this week at #1 on the Billboard album chart, knocking Drake from the top slot. At the same time, the first single from Smoke + Mirrors, “I Bet My Life” rocketed from #54 to #28 on the Hot 100 chart, and their new single “Shots” jumped nine slots to #89. In addition, Imagine Dragons’ 2012 debut Night Visions climbed 26 positions to #20. Despite the popularity of Imagine Dragons’ debut, Sermon said the group had no idea how fans would react to their new record and he still can’t figure out how the first one sold more than 2 million copies.

"If I knew what made that album so popular, I’d bottle it up and sell it myself," he says. "It’s was one of those right-place-at-the-right-time situations, but we also put a lot of love into it. It was four years in the making. We wrote some of it during our first year as a band, and some were done just a week before we finished recording. So I felt the album really tracked our growth from the beginning to the point it was released. But we never imagined it would do so well and keep selling."

The honesty, excitement, and time Imagine Dragons spent on Night Visions were paramount to its popularity. The songs were euphoric, but they felt real, and everyone from teens to soccer moms could relate to them. The all-pervasive popularity of the record made Imagine Dragons nervous heading into the writing sessions for Smoke + Mirrors. They knew they had an incredibly high standard to live up to and didn’t know if they had enough time to make an album that would take them to a higher artistic level. Worse still, they didn’t want to write what they thought people expected from them.

"It’s a tough situation to be in, because as a musician you can only do what you do, but you don’t want to repeat what you’ve already done," Sermon says. "If you’re writing a record and basing it on a fear of something or comparing it to something else, no matter what you do it’s not going to be good because you’re not being yourselves. Feeling that way is suffocating. Fortunately, we were able to get over that and just be honest about how we felt when we were writing the songs.

There’s a strong duality that runs throughout Smoke + Mirrors. Many of the songs are melodic and uplifting, but a sense of melancholy and confusion pervades “Hopeless Opus,” “Second Chances,” and “Gold,” the latter of which features the lines, “Only at first did it have its appeal/But now you can’t tell the false from the real/Who can you trust when everything you touch turns to gold?”

"There’s a lot of meaning behind us calling the album Smoke + Mirrors,” Sermon says. “There’s a lot of questioning on the album as far as what things in life are real and what things aren’t. What parts of this career and lifestyle are completely bogus and what parts aren’t and what parts of people are real?”

Imagine Dragons have been both thrilled and mystified by the opportunities they’ve had since Night Visions became a big seller and the band began to sell out large venues. They performed “Radioactive” with Kendrick Lamar, both on Saturday Night Live and at the 2014 Grammy Awards. And they were invited to exclusive parties reserved for elite celebrities.

"It was weird, "Sermon says. "It was like, ‘Are you treating me this way because of who I am, or do you genuinely care about me as a person?’ Honestly, we still feel a little bit like outsiders when it comes to celebrity. It’s not something that interests any of us. We’re all pretty big music nerds. We would rather make music on our laptops than go to a raging party at 3 in the morning."

Equally perplexing was the way they were treated by people around them. Everyone wanted to buy them dinner, and clothing companies started showering them with free goods. The only strings attached were the laces.