Despite the ostensibly humanizing presence of Rick Rubin, rock’s patron saint of prestige, these quintessentially Vegas showmen still sound like they’re firing their emotions out of a T-shirt cannon.
There have been other rock bands from Las Vegas, but none have embodied the city’s essence like Imagine Dragons. Packed with all the pyrotechnics and budget-busting pageantry of the Strip, each of the band’s albums has played like an imagined Cirque Du Soleil production, as if they were designed not for stereos but for stages. If you’d never seen a picture of frontman Dan Reynolds before—and, despite this band’s monumental success, a lot of people haven’t—you might guess he looks like Criss Angel.
That embrace of brute-force spectacle has made Imagine Dragons one of modern rock’s few true blockbuster attractions, one of the most streamed bands of the Spotify era. But monetizing music isn’t the same as making people care about it. With no central personality for fans to feel truly vested in, the band can seem as anonymous as the black-shirted techies that strike the Wynn Encore Theater each night. On their fifth album, Mercury – Act 1, Reynolds works to change that, teaming with rock’s patron saint of prestige, Rick Rubin, for a humanizing makeover, complete with the requisite songs about suffering and mortality that Rubin demands from all of his charges.
Rubin’s presence softens Imagine Dragons’ sound in places, and after so many albums that played like the THX sound effect drawn out for an excruciating 50 minutes, that’s a welcome change of pace. In rare moments, Reynolds’ Rubin-mandated vulnerability works to his favor, especially on album highlight “Wrecked,” which he wrote about losing his sister-in-law to cancer. Here his clumsy lyricism, usually a liability, becomes an asset. When he sings, “We were there for the ups and downs/And there for the constant rounds of chemo,” it’s touching in its plainspokenness.
Overstatement is still this band’s very reason for being, though, so for most of Mercury they fire their emotions out of a T-shirt cannon. Reynolds’ snarl-yell, his signature since “Radioactive,” is one of the most grating sounds in popular music, and he goes absolutely nuclear with it on “Dull Knives,” which stews in wall-punching rage even as it pleads for empathy: “I’m crying for help, it’s such a cliché/Invisible pain, it’s filling each day.” Even worse is “Cutthroat,” a fuck-shit-up, you-want-a-piece of-me Woodstock ’99 throwback that’s the most dirtbag thing Fred Durst never wrote. Ironically, that song is immediately followed by one called “No Time for Toxic People,” a true Spider-Man-pointing-at-Spider-Man moment: If you’re looking to cut toxic people out of your life, try starting with the ones who wrote “Cutthroat.”
Elsewhere the band’s genre hopping, the secret sauce behind their billions of streams, leads to some truly stupefying combinations. With its pillow-humping synths, “Monday” is a sleazier rewrite of Muse’s “Madness,” while the hip-hop experiment “Follow You” sounds like Post Malone covering Queen at karaoke. Dopier still is the Bleachers-styled “It’s OK,” where good intentions and implied LGBTQ allyship are undercut by goofy ’80s Vacation-soundtrack vibes and the mock-Caribbean accents of its chanted chorus. Did they really intend for the album’s big self-acceptance anthem to sound this much like Todd Rundgren’s “Bang the Drum All Day”?
It’s truly rare to hear an album talk out of both sides of its mouth so incoherently while pandering so desperately in all directions . Mercury tries to be all things to all people, but mostly it’s a headache, a grim study in just how patronizing popular music can be in 2021. Imagine Dragons do intermittently demonstrate some signs of growth, but these don’t count for much; attempts at maturity really don’t go all that far on an album that mostly sounds like a truck full of teens driving by and flashing the shocker at you.
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