The drums come first. No guitar, no synth pad, no slow build. Just a tom pattern and Reynolds’ voice arriving like someone who has already decided not to apologize. That opening is the whole argument of the song in four seconds: I don’t have time for comfort. You’ll understand why later.
“Believer” is one of the most played songs of the 2010s, which means most people think they know it. They hear it and they hear a big clean empowerment anthem, the kind of song that belongs at halftime, in a trailer, in a stadium singalong where everyone punches the air at the same moment. And on those terms it delivers. The track is nearly perfect at being that thing.
But Reynolds didn’t write it because he wanted to write an empowerment anthem.
He wrote it from inside something specific and long-running. Years before the song existed, something was going wrong in his body. He got a name for it at 24 and then carried it without saying a word in public. When he finally did, it was not in a press statement or an interview but on stage in Leeds in 2015, in front of 13,000 people. And the body was not the only weight he brought into the room. The arena format is not incidental to this song. He already knew what it felt like to say something enormous to a room that size.
“I was broken from a young age”
Dan Reynolds
The session where “Believer” got written was quick. Reynolds has said it felt like a song that was waiting to be written; it came together fast in the room. What the session actually was, including who else was in the room and what that other person was afraid of in that specific political moment, is a layer that doesn’t show up in the lyrics at all. The empowerment is real. So is everything underneath it.
Mattman and Robin produced it with a philosophy of very few sounds, but each one placed with care. Reynolds had made a dense record before this one and knew it. “Believer” was a correction. That tom pattern sounds bold because the space around it is enormous. What reads as maximalism is actually a room that’s mostly empty.
At the end of the 2010s, Billboard ran a decade-end chart for rock. The song that most people associate with Imagine Dragons’ peak wasn’t at the top. “Believer” was. Every rock song of that entire decade, and it finished first.
Put it on. Notice the space in it.
Pearls
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I
“The pain in Believer is a metaphor, nothing literal.”
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I
Part of it is literal. Reynolds has ankylosing spondylitis, a chronic autoimmune disease that attacks the joints of the spine and can fuse them. He was diagnosed at 24, after ulcerative colitis at 21, and first spoke about it publicly at Leeds Arena in 2015. Believer arrived in early 2017, years after the diagnosis. He has named the song's pain as several things at once: anxiety, the band's success, disease and depression. The metaphor has a spine under it.
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II
“"Believer" became an anthem for its universal message.”
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II
Reynolds co-wrote it with Justin Tranter around the time of the 2016 US election, and he has said Tranter had been telling him about the fear in his heart about the future. They were writing, Reynolds said, about wanting to change and wanting to speak their truth no matter what came their way. The Advocate later called it a queer anthem. The universal read is not wrong. But it began as two people deciding that fear would not be the last word.
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III
“"Believer" sounds like Imagine Dragons at their most bombastic.”
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III
It was the opposite decision. The band self-produced their previous album, Smoke + Mirrors, which Reynolds later called "way over-produced." For Evolve they chose Swedish duo Mattman & Robin for one reason: a philosophy of very few sounds, each one chosen with care. The tom-and-voice intro that lands like an arena explosion is, in production terms, a minimalist correction. The bombast is the sound of restraint.
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IV
“The shout that kicks off the chorus is just a hype yell.”
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IV
It is a word. The single most-shouted syllable in the song, the one whole crowds throw back, is "Pain." Co-writer Justin Tranter has confirmed it, and it is right there in the printed lyric, the line that turns on being made a believer. A lot of people hear it, and sing it, as "Hey." So the loudest, happiest noise in the song is the one thing the whole song is secretly about, said out loud, in one syllable, by everyone who never noticed.
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