Imagine Dragons’ Dan Reynolds on fame, fans, burnout and Mormonism ahead of Hong Kong gig

The last time Imagine Dragons came to Hong Kong, the tour that brought them here almost cost them their sanity.

“We’d been touring incessantly for seven years straight and we were burned out pretty hard,” Dan Reynolds, frontman and founder of the Las Vegas pop-rock titans told AM/FM video magazine earlier this year.

Their gruelling schedule took such a toll that Reynolds put the band on hold for a year while he sought treatment for depression.

And so began a hiatus that not only recharged the stars of global hits including Radioactive and Demons, but also began the gestation period for this year’s critically acclaimed comeback album Evolve, which the five-piece band will introduce to Hong Kong when they perform at the AsiaWorld Expo on January 13.

“We went home and reconnected with communities and family and friends,” says Reynolds. “We were able to have a different perspective and it gave us a chance to see how far we’d come.”

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The experience was a positive one. As its title suggests, Evolve shows the band, which formed in 2008, had matured into a world-beating act. It is stripped back and lean in comparison with the band’s previous two albums, Night Visions from 2012 and 2015’s Smoke and Mirrors, the album that made them global stars in the mould of indie-pop favourites and fellow Las Vegans The Killers.