"Radioactive" Imagine Dragons

It's been a great year for indie-rock crossovers, including Las Vegas quartet Imagine Dragons, whose stomping ballad "It's Time" was a favorite on the charts and in advertisements. Trading lilting mandolins for grimy dubstep, their follow-up, "Radioactive," feels like the haunted underbelly of that debut hit. Rather than finding comfort in a cheery sense of self, the pounding bass drum and forceful cries of Dan Reynolds turn the lyric "Welcome to the new age...I'm radioactive" into an evocatively pained statement of a man changed by the world around him. B+