I imagine dragons all the time. Well, one dragon in particular. His name is Oros and he’s my spirit-world pet, though I’m not sure he would appreciate me telling you about him. Probably gonna get some, uh, heat, for this. Point is, I don’t need a band to tell me what to do. Imagine Dragons? No problem. In fact, I Imagine Dragons so well that I imagined what their new album sounds like… because their publicist wouldn’t send it to me.

Track one—it begins. Trumpets sound. It is glorious. Maybe “glorious” is an overstatement but it sounds pretty nice. Big, beautiful, reverberating trumpets, met with a cacophony of giggling cherubs. Wow. “I am in for a treat,” I think to myself, because I have always wanted to know what dragons sound like. But then a man with a voice like a human cigarette starts singing and it fucking throws me. He’s saying something about wanting to dance naked in the stardust of some chick’s aura. All I can picture is the festival fashion section at this vintage store I used to work at that we were forced to put out every year before Burning Man. Why would anyone pair angelic horn music with this shit? Who produced this, Jared Leto’s Joker?

Speaking of the Joker, it has come to my attention recently that Lady Gaga is in talks to play Harley Quinn in a musical sequel to Todd Phillips’ Joker, and whatever that would be like is exactly what this record sounds like. It’s big. It’s glossy. It’s an amalgamation of every annoying thing you’ve ever seen or heard. It doesn’t exist anywhere outside of my imagination, and my imagination is an unforgiving fun house where every warped reflection is more absurdly repulsive than the last.

I Imagine Dragons so well that I imagined what their new album sounds like because their publicist wouldn’t send it to me

Somewhere around track five I lose my ability to process sound in a coherent way because of all the yodeling. I had an accident when I was an infant that sent me tumbling head first down a flight of wooden stairs in my baby bouncy chair, and I haven’t been able to handle yodeling since. Where was I? Where am I?

My mom just called, as if she could sense the trauma of my yodeling induced seizure resurfacing in a record review, and almost ruined everything by explaining to me what this band actually sounds like. Reality has fractured, my friends. I give this album a 6.5 because the acid trip experience I’ve just had is surely worth as much as Peppa Pig’s Peppa’s Adventures.

Now the imagined dragons are pissed at me for losing my concentration, resulting in their partial dissolution. They are spitting spectral fire at my laptop as we speak. My fingers are getting singed. The dragons take over my consciousness.

This is the Imagined Dragons speaking. We have emailed that publicist “LOOK WHAT YOU’VE DONE” 37 times. We are circling the Ikea desk of her mind, flooding her spiritual inbox with curses. There is no way Mercury – Act 2 is worse than the sound of our shrieking laughter as we burn down this Silver Lake apartment complex owned by the singer of Wavves. You should’ve sent Hether the fucking advance.