The Singles Jukebox

Imagine Dragons still can only imagine getting a not-bad score on TSJ for now.

[Video]
[2.64]

Thomas Inskeep: Lighters-up music for Karens across the land.
[1]

Iain Mew: Less a song than a collection of sketches for potential remixes and arrangements, from churchy echo to Queen-via-Muse harmonics to yacht-rock-via-Vampire Weekend. It’s a neat fit for the concept at least; they’re so willing to follow that they don’t really have any idea of their own where to go.
[5]

Katie Gill: The most memorable part of this absolute nonentity of a song is that the music video honestly expects us to believe that someone’s favorite band is Imagine Dragons.
[4]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: “I’ll follow you down to your deepest low.” Mayhaps this is subliminal messaging being incepted into the minds of indifferent fans? 
[2]

Nortey Dowuona: Hey, you know that dragons are hoarders by nature, right? Can’t we just give Dan Reynolds a massive pile of Amazon money and hide him back in Salt Lake City? And take a gold ingot to that cave whenever he decides to rain thunderous 3-D drums and flat synths over screaming cities? Please!
[3]

Andrew Karpan: The croaking, cartoonish harmonies that rattle toward the end of the record are among some of the most evil sounds I have heard so far in my small life, a sound that spells Dantean doom. To call a track titled “Follow You” creepy feels besides the point: this is the sound of creepiness itself, a funhouse mirror of noise whose mild shocks are the most horrifying.
[2]

Samson Savill de Jong: Imagine Dragons have become the Eminem of the indie rock world in recent years, once popular and talented and now the butt of jokes from the internet, possibly treated harsher than others because of the nagging sense that they used to be good. It gives me no pleasure to report that with “Follow You,” Imagine Dragons have slipped even further in to the mire. The song sounds like it’s about nothing, it uses the repeating word gimmick that went out of style 15 years ago, there’s absolutely nothing inventive or interesting in it. This covers the same ground as “Fix You,” but that song sounded like a dude who didn’t really know how to help but wanted to give it his best go. This song sounds like empty triumphalism, with no thought put into how any of the sounds are meant to relate to each other. When he says he’ll always be around, it feels like a threat, both to the girl and to us. Irredeemably bad.
[0]

Alfred Soto: Who says rock is dead? So long as the Dragons keep imagining these pastel-colored incursions into pre-COVID arena EDM, magazines will have plenty of cover story fodder.
[3]

Taylor Alatorre: I think it’s great that Dan Reynolds has been able to patch things up with his wife. And there is something to admire in his willingness to forgo the inevitable Stripped Down Piano Ballad and instead declare his love for her in a big, thumping Imagine Dragons song. But the admiration pretty much ends there. 
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: Imagine Wife Guys Dragons is certainly sounding pleasant these days. Really! The last few chimes even sound like they could segue into “Borderline.”
[5]

Vikram Joseph: Coming in over a cheesy organ line, Dan Reynolds’ vocals barge in like the sonic equivalent of the Big Bird door gif, so bad that they cross over into hilarity. Even if she weren’t having “heart attacks every night” — which to be fair sounds quite disruptive — it would be hard for the subject of this well-meaning, utterly hideous song to take it seriously. (The heart attack line is, with comic acuity that would be enviable were it intentional, delivered in the exact same cadence as the last lines in the verses of “We Didn’t Start The Fire”: “heart attacks every night, OH YOU KNOW IT’S NOT RIGHT!”). There’s also a bit after the second chorus where our friend makes a sound like he’s gargling socks for fully 15 seconds. The song, as you’d expect, is lumbering synth-rock of absolutely no consequence, but Reynolds’ performance launches it into the realms of the groundbreakingly terrible.
[1]