To say that MUSE have had a few rough years may be putting it too lightly. When you think about it, their descent from a band once considered creative visionaries to a legacy act who felt like shadows of their former selves is a spectacular supernova.
Perhaps it was inevitable. Like a good number of local circa-2008 alt kids, I saw MUSE live at My Coke Fest. Fresh off their monumental Black Holes and Revelations tour, and just five months before “Supermassive Black Hole” would become the anthem of vampire baseball leagues around the world, the MUSE of yesteryear was an anomaly of a rock band.
Their stylishly minimal art-rock aesthetic flirted with ideas of a dystopian future by embracing technology at a time when the world was still uncertain about its growing presence in everyday life. Sonically, they pushed alternative rock into collision with electronic music and the language of physics, producing a sound so distinctive it genuinely felt like it had arrived from the future.
The concept reached its pinnacle on 2008’s Black Holes and Revelations. The impact of the band’s third album was seismic, turning the tides of the alt-rock scene and leaving a sea of imitations in its wake. The Killers started listening to techno and asking if we were “Human”, Thirty Seconds To Mars went to war, and Hurts… happened.
To follow up a record like this was no small feat, and MUSE tried in earnest to do just that by doubling down on the dystopia of it all. The results were varied and, ever since their last solid body of work, The 2nd Law, the band has drifted further down the straight, Top 40-chasing path set by the Coldplays and Maroon 5s of the world.
In this sense, their latest album, The WOW! Signal, is a course correction of back towards the gravitational pull of their first three albums. Yes, this is MUSE reheating their nachos—a strategy that has recently proved surprisingly successful for artists entering the legacy phase of their careers.
It’s nostalgic enough to hook longtime fans, while remaining interesting enough to catch the attention of new listeners. The band’s thematic concerns of extraterrestrial communication and existential wonder also feel relevant again, as two decades later the world finds itself in another state of technological anxiety.
Like Absolution, The WOW! Signal takes inspiration from heavy metal and noise rock, revisiting some of the band’s signature sounds from this perspective. The ghost of “Supermassive Black Hole” haunts “The Sickness In You & I”, free from its layers of distortion as a more aggressive, chugging nu-metal headbanger.
“Unravelling” carries “Undisclosed Desires” in its DNA, folding its palette of alt-dance and new wave between passages of moody goth metal reminiscent of Evanescence. “Hexagons” takes us back to the electronic math rock of The Resistance, while album closer “Space Debris” will be a welcome surprise for First Testament MUSE fans with its callback to the trip-hoppy art rock of Showbiz.
But the album also honours some of the band’s more divisive choices. Rather than erase them, MUSE embraces their place within the band’s discography, returning to these ideas with renewed confidence and, this time, the substance to match.
“The Dark Forest” is a gonzo, five-minute rock opera, opening the album with Gregorian chants, face-melting hard rock riffs, and a middle eight that sounds like the score to The Mummy. If this were Lordi, the song would win Eurovision. The retro synthwave of “Nightshift Superstar” returns to that mission in 2018 that should’ve been aborted. Though the sound is far more refined and better adapted to MUSE’s tastes, it’s still a style that never quite feels like home turf for the band.
Despite these missteps, The WOW! Signal is MUSE’s strongest body of work in over a decade and, at ten tracks long, their most cohesive in years. Retreading the earliest corners of their back catalogue, the album makes every effort to remind us that MUSE are, first and foremost, a rock band, even if it doesn’t entirely absolve them of their recent sins. Longtime fans will hail it as a sort of second coming—and they might be right. MUSE may have just won back some of the listeners they lost along the way, myself included.
