Clearly they didn’t bring any…

[Video]
[3.71]

Katie Gill: “Alright Dragons, what do we have?” “Well, I still really like the minimalism of ‘Royals’.” “Brilliant, we’ll do that, but we need something HIP and POPULAR as well, even if we barely have any idea how to do it in the first place.” “Oooh, it’s a big thing right now to digitally mess with words in the chorus, making it entirely unsingable live. Remember ‘Down’ and ‘It Ain’t Me’? Those are big.” “Brilliant! Thank you fellow Dragons! We’ve got ourselves a half-assed hit perfect for playing in car ads and in Planet Fitnesses everywhere!”
[4]

Iain Mew: It’s not much more than a load of sound effects hung around the most basic of lyrical ideas, but simple silly joy is a good choice for something throwaway.
[6]

Alfred Soto: I direct the activists in Berkeley to protest a band that thinks manipulating “thunder” makes a novel hook.
[0]

Thomas Inskeep: When did all of the most popular U.S. “rock” bands quit actually rocking? From Maroon 5 to Linkin Park to Imagine Dragons, they all just sound like a singer, a sampler, and some of Max Martin’s minions locked in a studio. “Thunder”? This doesn’t even come close to a light sprinkle.
[0]

Hannah Jocelyn: Better than almost anything they’ve done since “Shots.” Imagine Dragons is the last band to pull off a song against the Haters, but there’s enough here to cut through the percussion-and-distortion formula that’s become somewhat of a signature sound. Even something like “Kids were laughing in my classes/While I was scheming for the masses” is imperfect in a charming way, as opposed to cringeworthy or boring like “Believer.” For a group that’s usually a catch-all term/scapegoat for generic alt-rock music, it’s impressive that they even have a sound to ‘return’ to that’s accidentally, but distinctly, Imagine Dragons. 
[6]

Will Adams: I’ve never been keen on the liquefying of alternative radio into a swamp of bassy beats and distortion. Mainly, it’s resulted in hits that take a kitchen sink approach to production that sounds like gray sludge. Imagine Dragons have typified that sound, and it’s no more apparent than on “Believer” and now “Thunder.” The boom-boom sound painting is obvious, the vocal chops limp, and Dan Reynolds sounds a bit like Flo Rida. A pile of sound with no impact.
[4]

Micha Cavaseno: A song where you can actually HEAR the rap hands being attempted long before you even see the video that isn’t a rap song! In retrospect, Imagine Dragons are pioneers of the idea of the rock song as ‘Track’; sure, “Thunder” is a mold that Lorde had embodied and then decided to outgrow. But it’s also fascinating in how it takes the Bhasker-core style and makes it perfectly tame. A decade ago, the idea of a song with an extensively warped & pitch-shifted sample chorus laid upon DJ Toomp style 808 kick basslines, that’s just meant to be a song about believing in yourself that’d do well as a grade school graduation, was certainly not a future I could’ve predicted. So the surprise that this is the present is both enticing for what’ll happen when people do it ‘weird’, but also in just how confounding it is.
[6]