Thanks to their ‘Believer’ music video, Imagine Dragons have already garnered two billion views on YouTube. Now that they have a second video to hit two billion views, they are in rarefied air. This week saw the passing of the milestone for the group’s thunderous 2017 rock single ‘Thunder’ off their third album, ‘Evolve’.
The black and white video, shot in Dubai by filmmaker Joseph Kahn, illustrates the song aesthetically and has amassed more than 12 million likes. The song reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 rankings. The song’s aggressive chorus is sung by vocalist Dan Reynolds while standing in front of lizard-like aliens, sheep and krumping aliens in the accompanying video. Images of hundreds of high-end sports vehicles fill the roadway while Reynolds and his bandmates are cloned into an army of thousands.
The band’s ‘Demons’ video, which was made by Alex da Kid, reached the billion view milestone in July of last year. It was the fourth video in the group’s history to hit the one billion mark at the time, behind ‘Believer,’ ‘Thunder,’ and ‘Radioactive.’
The band from Las Vegas spoke in an interview about how they continue to achieve new heights ten years after their big break in the music industry. “It’s so funny to me when people are like, ‘Well of course I could do pop music, but I choose this [other genre],’” singer Reynolds stated after mentioning that it is “really complex” to compose seemingly simple pop tunes. “I’m like, ‘Great pop music? Like, big songs that live on? That’s actually really hard.’”
The evidence can be found in the other impressive stats the band has achieved, such as: more than 17 million equivalent album units with 14.8 billion official on-demand streams in the U.S.; 19 Hot 100 hits; five top-10 albums on the Billboard 200; 12 entries on the Radio Songs chart (including 7 top-10 hits and 2 No. 1s); nearly two dozen top-10 hits on the Hot Rock Songs chart; and four monster singles (‘Radioactive,’ ‘Demons,’ “Believer’ and ‘Thunder’) certified Diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America.
– Riya Sohini