Imagine Dragons headlines Allegiant Stadium — PHOTOS
When explaining the impact that Las Vegas has had on him as an artist, Dan Reynolds equates the city to one of music’s greatest rockers of the unitard.
“Certainly the eccentricity and the largeness of the city, sonically, has always been fascinating to me,” the Imagine Dragons frontman says of his hometown. “One of my favorite bands is Queen, and I think Freddie (Mercury, the band’s singer) was always very unapologetically large and the music was unapologetically large and diverse and went all over the place — just eccentric and grand and I’ve always loved that.
“Vegas encompasses that,” he continues, “and I think it just pushes the band even more in that zone. I’m a performer at heart. I was born and raised in Las Vegas.”
And his band played its biggest Las Vegas show yet, headlining Allegiant Stadium on Saturday.
Imagine Dragons are touring in support of their new double “Mercury Acts 1 & 2,” a haunting and hopeful song cycle heavily influenced by loss.
The two-hour show had an acoustic set in the middle and a mix of new material with mega-hits like “Radioactive,” “Thunder” and “Believer.”
The band’s current tour follows a European trek over the summer. Among the highlights: Imagine Dragons drawing over 115,000 fans to two shows in the Czech Republic.
Reynolds brought his family with him on much of the tour.
“All my off days were kind of wandering the city with my kids, going to different parks, seeing different sights,” he recalls, “just showing them the world I think was my greatest joy. There’s just so much life that happened over the last seven months when you’re traveling every day.”
It was Imagine Dragons’ first extended roadwork since the pandemic, and Reynolds noticed the difference.
“Every show has felt important to people, getting out, just being amongst other people,” he says. “It’s something that people take for granted much less now.”
Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @jbracelin76 on Instagram
