March 29, 2024

About the author  ⁄ Caitlin White

Imagine Dragons Take You Inside The Creation Of Their Soaring ‘Transformers’ Song

by 2 mins ago

Imagine Dragons knew that when Michael Bay wants to talk to you, you drop what you’re doing and take the call.

The Las Vegas band have been touring their debut album, Night Visions, for the past two years, but when Bay reached out about composing a song for the latest installment of his alien-robot franchise, “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” they were eager to contribute.

After watching parts of the film with Bay, lead singer Dan Reynolds said that the idea for the theme for the original song they wrote “Battle Cry” just came to him.

“I said ‘I have this theme idea,’” Reynolds explained in a new featurette. From there, the band wrote the song along with composers Steve Jablonsky and Hans Zimmer. “As we were in the room with them we’d be playing something,” he added, “they would change one note and suddenly it would give this feeling of remorse, or feeling of happiness.”

Since Imagine Dragon’s music is already based on epic, swelling choruses like the one on their Grammy Award Winning single “Radioactive” it makes sense that they connected to the high-energy action of the “Transformers” sci-fi series. “Battle Cry” seems to follow a similar format, building from delicate strings into an enormous, drum-filled chorus—think Coldplay circa Viva La Vida era.

“Transformers: Age of Extinction” hits US on Wednesday, June 26 and “Battle Cry,” which was released as a one-off single on June 2, is available for purchase now.