Imagine Dragons and the triumph of proximity grandiloquence

BarcelonaWith his hand on his chest, he blew a kiss of gratitude for the enthusiasm with which the Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys enjoyed the hour and three-quarters of the concert. This was the gesture of Dan Reynolds, the singer, leader and spokesperson for Imagine Dragons, when the concert ended. Believer, the finale of a performance filled with confetti, sing-along rock, and an almost excellent sound. Quantitatively, the Las Vegas group is the biggest rock band to emerge in the last 15 years. On Spotify alone, songs like Demons, Thunder and Believer They have more than 2.7 billion views, more or less like Long live life by Coldplay. What's the secret?

They have a dozen songs with structures prepared for the epic and sewn with familiar sounds. They are Coldplay without the pretension of changing the world. They are U2 without a messianic leader or the obsession with defining the future of music. They play the card of grandiloquence from intimacy, a paradox they embrace by doing emotional therapy of proximity that reaches multitudes. "Keeping things inside is poisonous. Express them and be free. Life is always worth it, live it," said Reynolds before performing Walking the Wire, recalling, as he often does at concerts, that he suffered from depression. are the correct ones, including the flags supporting the LGBTQ+ community and Ukraine. Reynolds, the son of a Mormon family, like guitarist Wayne Sermon, has an X painted on the back of his hands. that concert halls used to put up for minors so they wouldn't be served alcohol, and that young people appropriated as an identity). forcefulness and some stage tics. I'm so sorry with a guitar solo that summoned charismatic riffs from rock history, and Reynolds, a singer in the body of ex-military man Jack Reacher who recalls the physical rotundity of frontmen of hardcore like Henry Rollins, gave us a good number of iconic images, like when in Bad liar He brandished the microphone stand as he walked purposefully along an arrow-shaped catwalk spread out over the dance floor among the audience. Or when he closed his eyes to do the falsetto in Fire in these hills, the song that opened the concert. Or when he took off his tank top to reveal his tattoo-free torso and make the heat of the Barcelona night less hostile.

Imagine Dragons' great success is the way they set the tone of the concert with a couple of songs and maintain it with hardly any variations throughout. After Fire in these hills and the hip-hop rock of Thunder They already had the audience where they wanted it, and where they would have it when they made the dramatic Demons, when they linked the vaudeville Wake up –one of the four on the album Loom (2024) who played – with a Radiocative culminated with instrumental catharsis and when the people hit the decisive stanzas ofIn your corner. The audience, overwhelmingly enthusiastic, openly gave themselves over to the choruses with equal intensity at the beginning and the end, always attentive to Reynolds's movements on the catwalk, a paradoxical stage decision. On the one hand, the singer can get closer to the audience, but at the same time he remains disconnected from the three musicians, who for much of the concert seem like soldiers under the orders of a despotic sergeant who only gives them a piece of the mind from time to time. This is what happens in the inevitable acoustic moment with the four at the tip of the arrow making Next to me, self-pitying intimacy sung out loud and with thousands of cell phones lighting up the night, and Bet my life, fast-paced country-folk that attempts to explain the singer's troubled relationship with his parents.

The other success is not to complicate things. Yes, they bring a grandiose stage set, with giant screens that combine images of the concert with others specific to each song, but the conceptual sophistication is like something out of elementary school. When they do Sharks, sharks appear on the screens. When they play Birds, a ballad that carries the omen of the epic in the melody, the graphic resource is little birds. In Take me to the beach There are images of palm trees and beach, and they reinforce the obvious by scattering giant beach balls among the audience; balls that are kept on the EDM tour of Shots, who play with a festive spirit, but then disappear so as not to contaminate the discourse of the rest of the songs. All in order for a competent party, but without any tweaks that make you think the concert is unrepeatable.