For Millennials. By Millennials.
Imagine Dragons are dropping their latest music album, Mercury-Act. 1, on September 3, 2021. With just 10 days left until the release, the band has their fans all hyped up for the music. The firebreathers get excited whenever the band announces new music. The excitement also comes from the fact that Imagine Dragons drop clues in their music videos & social media posts to keep their fans busy and entertained even until the music comes out. This time, they have taken extra steps to build a complicated clues game, but it got solved too soon.
Related: Imagine Dragons’ new song Wrecked is full of grief, loss, emotions and longing
Imagine Dragons & Mercury ascending
The band, that has recently been nominated for VMA Awards, tweeted about the upcoming album on August 19, 2021. The album Mercury-Act 1 is about all the highs and lows in someone’s life. Hence, the name Mercury. They also confirmed that Dan Reynolds and the team have been working on this album from last 3 years. They went through 300 demos approximately, to arrive at the current stage.
Cutthroat, Follow You and Wrecked are the songs that are already released. As a surprise, Imagine Dragons started a treasure hunt game that kept all the fans entertained this weekend. The clues lead to snippets of unreleased songs. These clues do not cover all of the songs. However, it’s pretty fun and going through these clues literally gives you the Sherlock Holmes feels.
Imagine Dragons tweeted this on August 21, 2021, giving the first clue of the treasure hunt game.
Fans quickly started working on solving the “anagram” clue. They found a hashtag on the official site of Imagine Dragons. The hashtag #MercuryAscending leads you to a page that requires a password to unlock something. You can try passwords to unlock the main surprise. But no one has guessed that yet and the last clue is still not shared by the band yet.
Related: Imagine Dragons leave Easter eggs in Cutthroat music video
List of the clues in order
The next day after the anagram tweet, Imagine Dragons shared first hint. It is a link that takes you to a song by Imagine Dragons-titled Ragged Insomnia. Now, we all are familiar with this term. It’s an anagram for Imagine Dragons. The song Ragged Insomnia is not a part of the upcoming album. But it definitely leads to the second clue.
The Imagine Dragons fans community came together to solve all the clues. Every clue was taken as an Anagram. Imagine Dragons left the clue at the end of the song Ragged Insomnia. Reversed lyrics at the end of this song lead to a phrase “Hopeless Opus Backwards Channel”. As we know, Hopeless Opus is one of Imagine Dragons’ songs. In fact, there is an anagram in the lyrics that has been there all this time.
Reversing these letters lead to another anagram, literally making it: “there is an anagram”. Since the original clue was “Hopeless Opus Backwards Channel”, fans figured out that there would be a YouTube channel with this name. The said YouTube channel has a 0.54 seconds video snippet from their unreleased song Easy Come, Easy Go. It’s the 6th song of Mercury-Act 1.
Related: Dan Reynolds & Rob McElhenney go shirtless in Imagine Dragons’ Follow You music video
More snippets by Imagine Dragons
Easy Come Easy Go video snippet has letters, dashes and periods that form coordinates to a place Desert Breath. If you want to try decoding this video, play it on 0.25 speed. You’ll see letters flashing on the screen. These letters represent the digits on you mobile phone. Moreover, Facebook logo also flashes on the screen at the end of the video. That means, you have to guess the place through the coordinates and search it on Facebook.
By searching Desert Breath on Facebook, you come across snippet of the unreleased song, My Life. Somehow, the fans figured out the clue that these lyrics link to Cha-Ching lyrics. There was a clock in the video with anti-clockwise movement. And this formed the complete clue: reversal of Cha-Ching and search the result on TikTok. [because clock, you know]. Here is the only TikTok on this channel: gnihcahn.
If you focus on the lyrics, it refers to the Mercury-Act 1 song # 2: Lonely. Now, the tiktok shows the words “secondo album” (Italian for second album) and a blue bird. Blue bird represents Twitter. While, title of Imagine Dragons second album is Smoke + Mirror. Italian of smoke and mirrors is fumoespecchi. This Twitter account has “You’re close” in the bio as well. Whoever came up with the idea, is a genius.
You’re still our # 1
The Twitter account gives us a snippet of the unreleased song # 1. It also has a very weird background. Which is a autostereogram. This was the toughest clue, to be honest. I had to look for solutions on the Twitter to understand how it led to Discord.
That “In your eyes I can see” is a lyric from Imagine Dragons song I’ll Make It Upto You. Dan Reynolds also joined the Imagine Dragons Discord and shared lyrics of Dull Knives. He then shared the Discord link of the Discord channel titled I’ll make It Upto You.
Now, Imagine Dragons were not expecting their fans to solve all the clues so soon. There is still a final clue missing. let’s wait till we figure out what’s happening. The final clue will be shared soon. If you want to know it first, tune in to the Discord.
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