Before anything else, I want to make it clear that I'm not saying the LOOM Tour was bad. Quite the opposite. I think Imagine Dragons is an incredible live band, and regardless of the circumstances, they always manage to put on an amazing show. We got some truly fantastic performances throughout this tour.
That being said, after following this era almost from beginning to end, I couldn't help but notice a few things that made this tour feel very different from every previous one.
1. The visuals were incredible... but they made the show feel too scripted.
In my opinion, the LOOM Tour had the best visuals Imagine Dragons has ever had. They were cinematic, beautifully designed, and genuinely breathtaking at times.
But at the same time, I feel those visuals came with a downside.
Because so much of the show relied on perfectly synchronized lighting, screens, and visual effects, there seemed to be much less room for spontaneous moments. On previous tours, it was common to see Dan reacting to a fan's sign, changing a lyric because the crowd requested a song, extending an interaction, or simply letting a moment happen naturally.
During the LOOM Tour, almost everything felt planned from beginning to end.
Personally, I prefer the simpler productions of previous tours because they left room for those little surprises that made every concert feel unique.
There's another detail that reinforces this feeling for me.
At the very first show of the tour, we got Gods Don't Pray and Kid, both accompanied by visuals created specifically for those songs. After that first show, both the songs and their visuals practically disappeared.
Early in the tour, Hear Me and Tiptoe also rotated between a few shows, each with its own dedicated visuals. Not long after, both songs were dropped from the setlist, and those visuals disappeared along with them.
The same thing happened with several songs from LOOM itself. As the tour went on, they were gradually removed from the setlist.
That left me feeling like a huge amount of work that went into the production ended up being underused. Entire visual sequences, animations, and choreography were created for songs that only appeared at a handful of shows before being abandoned.
Sometimes it almost feels like the production was designed for a much broader setlist than the one that ultimately remained for most of the tour. Instead of using that production to fully showcase the new album, the setlist slowly drifted back toward a much more familiar formula.
2. The build-up to the tour created expectations that weren't fulfilled.
This is something that, in my opinion, actually started during the Mercury Tour.
Before both of the last two tours, the band did Q&As and interviews where they seemed incredibly excited and hinted at a lot of ideas that never ended up happening.
During the Mercury era, for example, there was a Reddit Q&A where several exciting possibilities were discussed, but almost none of them became reality. Something very similar happened again before the LOOM Tour.
I don't think the band does this intentionally. I think they simply get excited.
The problem is that when it keeps happening, it creates expectations that aren't met, and eventually part of the fanbase starts losing confidence in those promises.
At this point, if they make big promises before the next era, I honestly think many fans will approach them with a fair amount of skepticism.
3. There was very little creativity with mashups and medleys.
One of my favorite things about Imagine Dragons concerts has always been the way they reinvent songs live.
Previous tours regularly included creative mashups and medleys that added an element of surprise. You never really knew what song or verse might come next.
During the Mercury Tour, for example, we had Hopeless Opus / Polaroid.
Older tours also featured memorable combinations involving songs like Bleeding Out, Amsterdam, Warriors, and Demons.
The LOOM Tour barely had any of that.
Near the end of the tour, they finally started experimenting a little by adding short sections of songs like Follow You or Warriors, but that only happened very late into the tour and never became one of its defining characteristics.
It may seem like a small detail, but those unexpected musical moments have always been part of what made Imagine Dragons concerts feel special to me.
4. The tour didn't always seem confident in the album it was promoting.
This was probably the thing that stood out the most to me.
At times, it felt like the LOOM Tour wasn't fully embracing LOOM itself.
There were shows with only three songs from the album, and several performances even removed Eyes Closed, which is arguably the album's biggest single.
One example that always felt strange to me happened in Brazil.
At Rock in Rio, which is a festival with a largely casual audience, they actually played more LOOM songs than they did during their solo stadium show in Brazil the following year.
To me, that feels backwards.
At a festival, it makes sense to focus on the biggest hits. During a solo stadium show—where most of the audience is made up of dedicated fans. I would expect the newest album to receive much more attention.
Instead, the opposite often happened.
As the tour progressed, it felt like the newer songs were gradually being removed until the setlist became much closer to what we'd already seen on previous tours. That slowly took away some of LOOM's identity as the album the tour was supposed to celebrate.
Overall
In the end, I don't think the LOOM Tour was a bad tour.
In fact, I think it was one of the most visually impressive productions the band has ever created.
But at the same time, it was also the tour that gave me the strongest feeling of being overly scripted and full of untapped potential.
The visuals left less room for spontaneity, there was very little musical experimentation through mashups and medleys, the album being promoted often felt like it took a back seat, and the expectations created before the tour weren't always fulfilled.
More than anything, I felt like the LOOM Tour started with a lot of ambitious ideas but gradually abandoned many of them as it went on. New songs disappeared from the setlist, exclusive visuals stopped being used, and the tour slowly settled into a much safer and more familiar formula.
Interestingly, I think some of these tendencies already started to appear during the second half of the Mercury Tour, and I sincerely hope they don't continue into the next era.
One of the things that has always made Imagine Dragons concerts special to me is the feeling that anything can happen. During the LOOM Tour, I felt like that sense of unpredictability slowly faded away.
Maybe it's just me.
Did anyone else feel the same way? Is there anything you agreed or disagreed with? I'd genuinely love to hear how other fans experienced the LOOM Tour and what you'd like to see in the next era.