CHICAGO — There was no point in Imagine Dragons trying to out-do the WTF puppet-cage match narrative in the video for their breakthrough hit, “Radioactive.”
Instead, the 2013 VMA nominees for Best Rock Video decided to go the other way in the clip for their new single, “Demons,” focusing on the drama in our every day lives and their high-energy stage show. Just before the Las Vegas-bred band took the stage for one of those sweat-soaked gigs at Lollapalooza, singer Dan Reynolds told MTV News he thought the dramatic video for “Demons” is actually the perfect follow-up to the fantasy-like “Radioactive” clip.
“We intertwined a story through it that tells the story of demons,” he said. “There’s more to people than what you see at face value and often we judge people very quickly.”
The video for the fourth single from the band’s smash major-label debut, Night Visions, was shot during a show at Las Vegas’ The Joint earlier this year and mixes live footage with a story about love and loss. It opens with impressionistic, slow-motion shots of the band bathed in blue light before focusing in on a woman in the audience who, who soon learn, has lost a military spouse.
The camera pans across the crowd and catches a different fan, this one an emaciated man staring in the mirror, then another with a black eye from a parental assault and finally, a solider flashing back to a rescue of a comrade in arms during wartime.
“When you get to know them, there’s more behind the scenes,” Reynolds explained of the vignettes that take the excited fans from their in-concert joy to the knottier stories of their real lives. “We tried to portray that throughout ‘Demons.’ It kind of shows that there’s more going on than what you see when you just meet someone. Everyone has their own demons, their own problems.”
Amping up the impact of the clip is the fact that it is dedicated to one of the group’s biggest supporters, Tyler Robinson, 17, who died after a battle with cancer in March, inspiring Dragons to set up a foundation in his honor.
Lollapalooza is going on all weekend with sets from everyone from 2 Chainz, Icona Pop, Phoenix, Kendrick Lamar, Mumford & Sons, Lana Del Rey and many others. Stick with us all weekend for news, pictures and interviews from the festival!
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