Imagine Dragons exploded all the charts with their first album, “Night Visions,” back in 2012. It achieved immediate popularity, sold 2.5 million copies and three of its songs got into Top 20 of Hot 100 chart. When compared with this smashing success, the starting sales of Imagine Dragons’ follow-up album, “Smoke+Mirrors,” feel rather controversial.
“Smoke+Mirrors,” released February 17, sold 195,000 copies, which is both impressive and underwhelming, depending on your point of view. It is a good result for the slow winter season; but it feels rather mediocre when compared with instant success of “Night Visions.” The band was promoting itself really hard in order to achieve even this degree of success, according to the Inquisitr.
“Many believe that the first live ad during the Grammys had something to do with it. During the four-minute ad, the band aired its live performance of Shots in Las Vegas, perfectly targeting the right people. The band’s first album never made it to the top of the Billboard Top 200. Imagine Dragons also encouraged fans to do a little scavenger hunt with the new album. Album content clues were placed around select cities.”
In addition to that, the band has signed major contracts with just about every car company, Live Nation, Yahoo!, Target and a number of other big corporations, so the snippets of the new album have been floating around for weeks before its release, supporting the hype.
According to Slate , the band would be wrong to feel reassured with their current results, because right after the release people buy not so much the new album but act under the impression of the previous, best-selling, hit-making one.
“Obviously it’s too soon to tell if ‘ Smoke + Mirrors ‘ will have the chart longevity of its predecessor. But one week later, ‘Smoke’ tumbles out of the top slot, all the way down to No. 9, selling 75 percent fewer copies in week two (a not-unprecedented decline after a No. 1 debut, but definitely on the steeper side).”
But in addition to living up to the reputation of Night Visions, the band has another problem, namely, their ultra-popular song Radioactive which spend 87 weeks on Hot 100 chart – longer than any other song in the chart’s entire sixty-year history. So it is only natural that fans expect something different, but very similar to it – and it seems that Imagine Dragons didn’t quite manage to deliver.
