Imagine Dragons' dream comes true in Seoul

Imagine Dragons / Courtesy of Live Nation Korea

By Kwon Ji-youn

Alternative rock band Imagine Dragons’ claim to fame in Korea is their hit single “Warriors,” released in 2014 for the League of Legends World Championship in Seoul.

It was in October that year that the band took center stage at the Seoul World Cup Stadium to overwhelm some 40,000 gaming fans with a pulsating and impulsive performance -- but the crowd’s enthusiasm is just one of the many reasons they will be returning to Seoul on Aug. 13 to stage a concert.

“Korea is one of my favorite places,” Imagine Dragons’ bassist Ben McKee said in a recent phone interview with The Korea Times through live-events company Live Nation. “Seoul is a wonderful city. I got to go out a little bit and explore Hongdae and some of the night markets while we were here last year.”

McKee spent a good portion of his time in Korea experimenting with the food, and found he was partial to bibimbap, a mixed rice dish.

“The breakfast at the hotel and the different kinds of kimchi they had there was amazing,” he said. “When I came back home, I actually went out to go get some bibimbap because I was still craving it. But the kimchi they served in Korean restaurants in Las Vegas was so wrong. I immediately missed Korea and we just can’t wait to come back. We all had a great time there.”

While he kept busy out on the town, the other members were probably gaming, McKee joked.

“I’m actually the only one who doesn’t game,” he said. “I just don’t have the reflexes for it. But the other guys, they’re probably all playing League (of Legends) right now. You can hear the constant clicking sounds in the dressing room backstage.”

It was a meteoric rise to fame for Imagine Dragons, an American rock band from Las Vegas, Nevada. Their 2012 debut album “Night Visions” became a huge success, and their second, “Smoke + Mirrors,” released earlier this year, has followed suit.

Imagine Dragons, whose line-up consists of lead vocalist Dan Reynolds, guitarist Wayne “Wing” Sermon, bassist McKee and drummer Daniel Platzman, topped the year-end rock rankings for 2013, according to Billboard, which later named them the “Breakthrough Band of 2013.” Rolling Stone magazine labeled their single “Radioactive” the “biggest rock hit of the year.”

“We were really just focused on making music that we could be proud of, that we enjoy playing,” McKee said. “We were just writing music to see if it resonated with the people. A lot of our songs were written while we were on tour, while we were away from our family. We had the most incredible highs and the most incredible lows, and all of that was kind of captured in the ‘Smoke + Mirrors’ album.”

McKee confessed that “Radioactive,” which became the longest-charting single on the Billboard Hot 100, wasn’t a single the band had planned on releasing.

“But it just kind of created its own momentum once it got out there,” he said. “It slowly moved up the chart. It took much longer to get there but once it did, it stayed up there for so long. It was surreal _ we kept on expecting it to start creeping back down.”

And just when they thought things couldn’t get more hectic, the band became involved with the League of Legends music team. “Warriors” is also the official song of the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup.

“But it was an amazing experience,” he said. “We’ve had a couple of opportunities to collaborate on movies and video games, which is a great way for us to get our music out there internationally. ‘Warriors’ was a really cool collaborative process, and we created different versions of the song. Being able to play at the League of Legends Championship last year allowed us our first opportunity to come over to Korea and play for our fans.”

Imagine Dragons’ next concert in Seoul will be about connecting with the local fans and musicians as much as possible.

“We don’t want to reveal too much,” McKee said. “But we want to make something happen. We’re so excited to come to Seoul and we want to make sure we can come back over and over and over again. So we are going to make sure that it’s going to be an incredible experience for everybody, to go as hard as we possibly can and just push ourselves to the limit.”