Muse Returns With 10th Album 'The Wow Signal'
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- Muse released their 10th studio album, "The Wow! Signal," named after the unexplained 1977 radio transmission detected by an astronomer and held up as a possible extraterrestrial communication.
- Matt Bellamy fronts the record and returns to his longstanding lyrical theme of searching for something pure and real amid conformity, hypocrisy, and alienation.
- The album layers Queen, Korn, and Radiohead influences with '70s arena theatrics, '80s synth-rock, '90s alt-rock, and 2000s goth-metal into the band's signature "pile-up."
- "Be With You" runs from cathedral organ to electronic throb to what the review calls an "AOR orgy," while "The Dark Forest" features a celestial chorale joining Bellamy to belt in Latin.
- Ellie Goulding guests on "Hush," credited by the reviewer with bringing "a huge boost of warmth and personality."
- The closing track "Space Debris" strips things down by Muse standards — the review notes the irony, then concedes that if Muse kept things less intense, "they wouldn't be Muse."
Why it matters: For fans weighing Muse's first album in several years, the record is a full-throated return to the bombastic arena maximalism the band built its career on, with Matt Bellamy's yearning themes intact — but the review frames the result as exhausting spectacle rather than revelation, a verdict that matters for a band whose identity is inseparable from bigger-is-better excess.
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