Imagine Dragons - Mercury - Act 1 (2021) [24bit FLAC]

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.