Muse, a Love Affair

Muse named themselves Muse because it's short and looks good on a poster. That is the whole story. Matt, Dom and Chris were 14 and 15 years old, they wanted something that fit on a flyer, they picked the word, they kept it. By 1999 they had released Showbiz and the trajectory was set.

When I first did this episode of the podcast, the brand new track at the time was Will of the People, and I couldn't listen to it without thinking about Marilyn Manson's Beautiful People. The opening, the structure, the chant of the title back at you. Listen to them within an hour of each other and tell me I'm wrong, you can’t cause I’m not. The lyrics were doing exactly what Muse lyrics always do (war, control, citizens, bombs) and the energy was exactly where they always sit (upbeat track, apocalyptic content), so it slotted in fine.

That was 2022. The reason I'm bringing them back now: their tenth album, The Wow! Signal, drops 26 June. Two singles up so far. Unravelling (June 2025) is the heavier, festival-built one, written specifically for the run of summer dates that year. Be With You (March 2026) opens with a church organ recorded at the First Congregational Church of LA (apparently the second-largest pipe organ in the world, which is the kind of fact Muse will absolutely make a point of telling you), then drops into a dance track. Not a sentence I expected to write about Muse, but here we are.

The album takes its name from the actual Wow! Signal: a 72-second radio burst from the constellation Sagittarius picked up in 1977 that nobody has been able to explain since. The discovering astronomer literally wrote WOW! on the printout next to it, which is now also the album cover. The whole record is built around that idea, "cosmic mystery, existential hope, and the exhilarating possibility of contact with something far greater than ourselves" being the press-release framing. Cosmic stuff. Existential stuff. Very Muse.

I'm doing four tracks today. None of them are Sunburn or Plug in Baby or Feeling Good because that's low-hanging fruit and you already know those, and it is too easy cause I have a vivid memory of seeing the Sunburn music video on TV when TV was cool.

Lyrically, it's not their finest. There's a lot of "you know that I care." That isn't the point.

The point is what Matt's voice does inside it. The first 20 seconds are distorted, gnarly, almost a hook in itself. Then it pivots, melody comes in, and you're suddenly in a different song. Muse do this constantly. They chop and change inside one track and the joins still feel cohesive, which is its own kind of skill.

About 50 seconds in you get the vocals you came for. Completely synonymous with Muse. That nasal-edged tone you'd recognise blindfolded.

And the thing I am sorry to point out, because once you hear it you cannot unhear it: the intake of breath. He doesn't edit it out. Right before the big notes, you can hear him pull the air in. Most studios would scrub it. Muse leave it in. Now you'll hear it on every track.

Two minutes in, headphones up. There's screaming layered in the background, and what sounds like wires getting whipped. None of it is doing the obvious work. All of it is part of why the track feels denser than three guys should be able to make it sound.

Overdue sits at about 3.5 million Spotify plays. On the same album, Unintended and the title track are pulling far higher numbers. People skip Overdue. They shouldn't.

Headphones from the start.

The first 13 seconds, every instrument is in your right ear only. Nothing in your left. It feels like a sun-bleached Spanish holiday track. Then a second guitar comes in on the left, the whole stereo image opens up, and Matt arrives with "conforming on a Monday."

(He is right. I will be conforming on a Monday, cause I have bills and I need money.)

By 30 seconds the layers are stacking. Around 41 seconds the drums land, and the bass underneath is so deep it doesn't quite exist on speakers, you have to be wearing the headphones to feel it.

1:35 onwards, the riffs get unreasonable. My note on this section says, verbatim, "and now we're doing some fancy shit." I will not be improving on that description.

Stick with it for the British accent quirk. Matt switches between two different A sounds inside the same track. Sometimes it's [mimicking the long-A] disahster, sometimes a flatter A, and somehow both fit. Once you're listening for it, you start hearing it on every Muse track. Their lyrics are partly built around which A he wants in his mouth that day.

2:56, vocal gymnastics. Then a dirty, dirty guitar (or bass, take it up with someone who knows) drops in and your face will do that thing it does. Not a frown. Not a smile. Some third face that means yes good.

And then, exactly one second before the song ends, there's a fret scratch. One whole second of someone deliberately scraping a string. Just because they wanted you to hear it. I love that.

If you like this track, the natural follow-on is Hoodoo from Black Holes and Revelations. Same atmosphere, different mood.

The first six seconds of Reapers are boring. They are. They sound exactly like the opening of Face Down by Red Jumpsuit Apparatus and you will assume you know where this is going.

Then 0:07 happens. The song slaps you, straps you to a chair, and tells you we are about to go on a wild ride and you are going to enjoy it. Kinda like, take this bitch. And you will, cause you’re a bitch…

The word that keeps coming back as I listen to this track is speed. They are not holding back. From seven seconds onwards, every single second is doing something.

Listen for the hum that creeps in around 22 seconds. It builds and builds and you know something is coming.

Then 49 seconds onwards. Pure filth. Distorted, fast, deep, all the layers stacking. I don't care what the lyrics are. The lyrics aren't the point. He sings killed by and a drum hits, killed by and a drum hits, that's the point.

1:02, the harmonies underneath. They sound robotic, high-pitched, sat just behind the lead vocal. Lovely.

3:20, slides. Someone running something down the strings. I don't know what they're doing, I don't need to know.

4:23, they pretend the song is ending. It is not. They give you a little fake outro, then sirens at 4:44, then they spin you back up. By 5:36 there's a noise that sounds like a cymbal dropped on its edge and spinning to a stop. I cannot mimic it. You'll know it when you hear it. And by 5:53 they're playing vocal samples in the background that loop follow the yellow brick road on repeat.

Six minutes of nothing wasted.

For comparison, the consensus pick for Muse's heaviest tracks: Micro Cuts, Stockholm Syndrome, Assassin, House of the Rising Sun, and Shrinking Universe. I picked Reapers because it's the one I keep going back to. Take the recommendations as a starter pack if you want to get further into that side of them.

The Gallery is interesting because there are no vocals. None. Some background wailing that may or may not be a person. Otherwise it's pure instrumental Muse. If you played it to someone who knew the band but didn't know this track, they would still know it was them. Everything that makes Muse sound like Muse is in the music, not the singer.

The counter-experiment is Save Me, where Chris takes the lead vocal instead of Matt. The vocals are crisp. The performance is fine. The track is Muse-light. Not bad, not Muse. Which tells you the band is the band, but the voice is the voice. Both things are true.

This is where I'm finishing because it gives me Pet Shop Boys energy and I need to know if you hear it too.

The synth pulse, the urgency, the way the chorus sits on top of a relentless bottom layer. Drop it next to a Pet Shop Boys track and the DNA is almost fucking embarrassingly close. Different decade, different genre on paper, exactly the same engineering decision.

Dead Star gets an honourable mention if you fancy more, and why shouldn’t you?

I don't judge people for their music taste often. We all like rubbish sometimes, I love some fucking trash daily. But I genuinely struggle with someone who can't find a single Muse track that does it for them. There is too much range in this catalogue for that to be true. You'd have to be working at it.

Also, as I get to the end of this, I notice a glaring issue in the fact that I have no Muse vinyl. What the fuck?

Laters on a menjay.

Z