In a hotel room high atop the Bangkok skyline in Marriott Marquis Queen’s Park, the AU review’s Lachlan Mitchell got Imagine Dragons to reveal their plans to bring their new album Evolve to Australia.
The band begin a North American tour in support of their latest album in late-September and were appearing in a showcase of Marriott and Universal Music Group’s relationship. Two hours before they energetically astonished the lucky 400-person crowd with hits “Thunder”, “Demons”, “On Top of the World”, “Believer” and “Radioactive”, to name a few, they sat down with us for a chat.
The band are all in bright, floral button-up shirts on sofas around a small table and reply with an enthusiastic “Oh nice!” when I they find out I’m from Australia. Following a conversation that covered the inspiration behind their latest album, covering Midnight Oil on their 2015 Australian tour and Sydney versus Melbourne, I prompted the band on whether Australian fans will be able to see them soon. Lead singer Dan Reynolds replied with a sly smile, “Oh yes, we were just going over our tour dates coming up for the Evolve tour and we have Australian dates in the tour that have yet to be announced.”
“It’ll be 30 shows in small clubs”, guitarist Wayne Sermon joked. “Would you say it will be perfect surf and summer weather around the time?”, I responded trying to press for more details. Reynolds, leaning back in his chair after earlier singing a few bars of “Beds are Burning” smiles and continues, “Well, we do want to do this endless summer idea” (where they bounce between summer’s around the world). Sermon then opened his phone and chimed back in whilst scrolling through an email, “Let me see. We’re looking at April… actually May. What’s the weather like then?”.
Using their only knowledge of Fahrenheit/Celsius conversion – the “Beds Are Burning” lyric “Steam in forty five degrees” which the band knew to be about 115°F, they were happy to hear my confirmation that Sydney is typically around 20-25 degrees Celsius around that time, or 70°F they decided on after throwing out a few calculations and numbers.
Expect the full details of a 2018 Imagine Dragons Australian tour to be announced soon.
Imagine Dragons new album Evolve is out now through KIDinaKORNER and Interscope Records. Our complete chat with the band will be posted later this week.
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