And that's what we have with the new record. So we really tried to avoid both of those and just tried to create music that all of us liked and that all of us could get behind. "On the one hand, you could be like 'OK, we have everyone's attention so now we have to prove we're really good musicians and we're artsy and make avant-garde decisions and make a super out-of-left-field crazy record.' Or we could try to make 'Night Visions 2.' That's the other end of that spectrum. "I feel like there's a huge trap if your first record does well," he says. The result of those sessions is an album Platzman feels will be seen as a logical progression for Imagine Dragons. After you work on a song for eight hours, I don't know what anything sounds like anymore. "We tried to make it 9 to 5 as much as possible and really give ourselves a break. "So instead of having two weeks or a month in the studio and that's it, where your mindset is cramming as many hours as you can into the workday, it was literally our place," the drummer says. "Smoke and Mirrors" was recorded in a studio the alternative-rockers built between releases. So luckily we didn't realize about all the pressure and everything until we had already made the record."
It was only when we came in off the road that we were kind of realizing how crazy everything was. We were playing shows and the audience was slowly getting bigger. "But we were kind of in the eye of the hurricane for the whole thing. The listener is really smart today and can tell if it's coming from an honest place or not. Let's write 12 'Radioactives.' But that would be creating music out of fear. "We could have gone into the studio and been like, 'Radioactive' was really good. "It talks about creating music out of fear," he says. That's no way to make a record anyway, he says, citing a book titled "Effortless Mastery: Liberating the Master Musician Within." "It wasn't until we finished it," he says, "and people were like, 'Does it make you nervous after 'Night Visions?' that it was like, 'Oh geez, well, after you say it that way, now I am.' But when we made it? No." RELATED: 10 best Imagine Dragons songs (so far) And they did it with their first full-length release, the double-platinum "Night Visions," which spawned the biggest-selling rock song of the year, a nine-times-platinum triumph called "Radioactive."Ī lot of people in that situation would have found the prospect of returning to the studio to cut a follow-up to such a major breakthrough somewhat daunting, if not terrifying.īut drummer Daniel Platzman says it never crossed their minds.Īt least not while he and his bandmates were actually working on the album, "Smoke and Mirrors," which is due to hit the streets on Tuesday, Feb.
No rock artist sold more copies of a single album in 2013 than Imagine Dragons.