Considered a joke: how Imagine Dragons dethroned Nickelback as the worst rock band ever
No one enters the music industry looking to become the worst band in the world. It’s just the nature of the beast to have a few haters now and then, but it probably stings when the detractors are a little more vocal than your fans. Although Nickelback may have been one of the biggest names in rock and the bane of every rock fan’s existence throughout the 2000s, the 2010s gave the entire industry a new punching bag to rally around: Imagine Dragons.
Then again, what did Imagine Dragons do to deserve such ridicule? Dan Reynolds may not have had the strongest voice in the world, but what did he have to sing to have put him on the same level as Chad Kroeger, a man who has made an entire career out of a voice that sounds like Eddie Vedder if he showed up to a studio angry and half-drunk?
To understand that, we have to rewind a little bit back to the early 2010s. The Black Eyed Peas had one of the biggest songs in the country, rock and roll was moving to the fringes of the charts, and a little rock band started making waves with the album Night Visions.
And for a brief moment, they don’t get off to a bad start. They are clearly trying to become stadium rock idols with songs like ‘It’s Time’ and ‘Radioactive’, but both of those did decent numbers and actually had some decent hooks behind them. If they continued like this, we might see them as a fond memory of 2010s indie rock. Then the band got an idea… an awful idea.
As their star continued to rise, albums like Smoke and Mirrors became an ominous sign of things to come. Compared to the sophomore slump that expands on their old sound, this feels like they were trying to sand off any of the originality from their sound, leading to songs that seem designed for car commercials.
It didn’t get much better in the next few years, with the following albums, and the singles went from annoying to musically transparent. Plenty of bands are like that, though, but the fact that Imagine Dragons were still at the top of the charts speaks more about the sad state of mainstream rock than Nickelback ever could.
Nickelback may have had atrocities in their catalogue, but allow me to put my entire critical lens on the line and attempt to defend them. As much as Kroeger’s voice was grating at times, it was at least something that people could recognise in a crowd. A song like ‘Photograph’ might trigger some bad 2000s-era nightmares, but you weren’t going to mistake them for anyone else.
On the other hand, Imagine Dragons have taken on the role of a band designed to be ignored. Considering most of the songs feel like pieces of advertising rather than anything artistic, their hits tend to fall into a weird dead zone that makes one’s ears instinctively turn away from them because they think they’re about to hear about the latest Toyota RAV4.
That hasn’t stopped the algorithm from loving them, though, especially when a track like ‘Thunder’ racks up the same streaming numbers as the biggest names in music. Compared to songs that you want to dissect for hours after you hear them, everything from ‘Thunder’ to ‘Believer’ is the kind of music that’s meant to fill up a random workout playlist and then be thrown out the minute that the track ends.
So, is there a chance that Imagine Dragons can overcome their Nickelback-ification? The answer still remains a firm maybe. Although they are still up to their usual tricks half the time, you can hear them channelling some of their anger back into their music, as if they were venting their frustrations about being considered a joke.
If this is a conscious career decision, there may still be some hope for them to turn themselves around and start writing from the heart again. After all, even some of Nickelback’s greatest detractors have admittedly cooled on their opinion of the band being the group that ruined rock and roll. Maybe the same can be said for Imagine Dragons, but we’ll all have to wait and see.
