Imagine Dragons already know what it feels like to notch two billion YouTube views for a music video thanks to their “Believer” clip. Now they are in rarified air with a second video to hit two bills. The band’s roaring 2017 rock hit “Thunder” — from their third album, Evolve — passed the mark this week.
The tune that peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts is visually represented by the black and white clip filmed in Dubai by director Joseph Kahn that has also rolled up more than 12 million likes. The visual finds singer Dan Reynolds standing on an avenue surrounded by lizard-like krumping aliens, and sheep, singing the song’s urgent chorus as images of hundreds of luxury sports cars fill a highway and Reynolds and his bandmates are cloned into an army of thousands.
Last July, the band’s video for the Alex da Kid-produced single “Demons” hit the one billion mark. At the time it became the group’s fourth video to reach the one billion plateau, following on the heels of “Believer,” “Thunder” and “Radioactive.”
In December, the Las Vegas-bred band spoke to Billboard about how they manage to keep scaling new heights a decade after their commercial breakthrough. “It’s so funny to me when people are like, ‘Well of course I could do pop music, but I choose this [other genre],’” singer Reynolds said after noting that it is “really complex” to write seemingly simple pop tunes. “I’m like, ‘Great pop music? Like, big songs that live on? That’s actually really hard.’”
The proof is in the other impressive numbers the band has put up (as of December 2022), including: more than 17 million equivalent album units with 14.8 billion official on-demand streams in the U.S., per Luminate; nineteen Hot 100 hits, 5 top 10 albums on the Billboard 200, 12 entries on the Radio Songs chart (including 7 top 10 hits and 2 No. 1s), nearly two dozen top 10 hits on the Hot Rock Songs chart; and four monster singles (“Radioactive,” “Demons,” “Believer” and “Thunder”) certified Diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America.
Watch the “Thunder” video below.
