There’s a rumour going around the members of Imagine Dragons are Annunaki – flesh-eating reptilian humanoids – disguised as pop pins, who want to rule us or eat us. Or it could just be that the ‘lizard elite’ thing is an allegory for the parasitic nature of mainstream pop.
Smoke + Mirrors comes at an important time because Imagine Dragons’ are becoming less tolerable, and maybe something needs to make us stem our vitriol a little. Maybe the right synth-rock jam pudge will push us enough toward a hard reset, like when people in the ‘90s could say they liked Limp Bizkit and TLC in the same breath and that’d be okay. Honesty can be the only thing that could redeem a band Queens Of The Stone Age told to get fucked. In Shots, the boys start of apologising in peaky falsetto, but it seems they’re being more self-indulgent than self-aware.
Given conspiracy theories about the Dragons abound, songs called Smoke + Mirrors, Thief and The Fall may be a bit on the nose. The Fall is fodder for health insurance ads, and Thief sounds like that one hit they had which I think actually was a health insurance ad. I’d like to apologise for ever advocating for Imagine Dragons, because what we’re dealing with here is something criminally dishonest. There may be a band and a record that unites the tribes of music appreciation, but it won’t be a record that makes cutesy winks at deception in its very title.
BY NATHAN HEWITT
