Imagine Dragons - Evolve (2017) [Hi-Res]

It’s subtle, but longtime Imagine Dragons fans will notice a newfound brightness on the Las Vegas band’s third album. That’s because frontman Dan Reynolds wrote most of it after coming out of a serious depression that had plagued him since childhood but became worse after the band’s 2015 world tour. Evolve marks his triumphant recovery. On arena anthems such as “Thunder” and “Start Over,” the band trades its signature angst for light rhythmic textures and fluid vocals about rebuilding. “Can we start over before it’s over?” Reynolds sings. “Come alive, come alive, come alive again.”

A Grammy Award-winning alt-rock outfit with a knack for crafting stylish, stadium-ready anthems as emotionally charged as they are radio-friendly, Las Vegas-based Imagine Dragons had their genesis in Provo, Utah, where vocalist Dan Reynolds met drummer Andrew Tolman while the two attended Brigham Young University. In 2009, the group, which by this time included guitarist Daniel Wayne Sermon, bass player Ben McKee, and Tolman's wife Brittany Tolman on keys and backing vocals, had made a name for itself regionally and relocated to Reynolds' hometown of Las Vegas to record a pair of well-received EPs (Imagine Dragons and Hell and Silence) at the Killers' Battle Born Studios. A third EP, It's Time, arrived the following year and helped land the group a record deal with Interscope. The Tolmans parted ways with the group prior to the Interscope deal, and Daniel Platzman took over on drums.

In 2012, Imagine Dragons hit it big with the Continued Silence EP and their debut long-player, Night Visions, the latter of which debuted at the number two spot on the Billboard 200 and landed the group multiple awards -- it later went double platinum in the U.S., largely on the smash success of "Radioactive," which became the biggest-ever digital rock track in America. During 2013, two other hits followed: "Demons" in the U.S. and "On Top of the World" elsewhere. The group spent the bulk of 2014 finishing its second album. Co-produced by Alex da Kid, Smoke + Mirrors, the band's sophomore long-player, was released in February 2015 and debuted at number one, preceded by the singles "I Bet My Life" and "Shots." The band toured often between June of 2015 and February of 2016, eventually releasing the concert set Smoke + Mirrors Live, recorded in 2015 at a sold-out Air Canada Centre in Toronto.

Imagine Dragons took a well-deserved hiatus in 2016, making only a few sporadic forays into the studio to record three songs for soundtracks: "Not Today" for Me Before You, "Sucker for Pain" for Suicide Squad, and "Levitate" for Passengers. The group also recorded songs for their third proper album, releasing the lead single "Believer" in January 2017. The album, entitled Evolve, was released later that year; as the name suggests, it saw the band continuing to evolve, ditching almost entirely any remaining rock elements in their sound to fully embrace a heavily synthetic electro-pop-R&B style.