Muse
Entry updated 27 October 2025. Tagged: Music.
UK rock band, formed in Devon by frontman Matthew Bellamy (1978- ). The group favours a bombastic and indeed deliberately melodramatic musical style, guitar-based but augmented with many other instruments, amplified and overdriven to sometimes preposterous levels. The group's songs, often science-fictional, are conveyed in Bellamy's distinctive voice, stronger at the top-end and with a wailing falsetto. This is a musical mixture that works well with grandiose or apocalyptic material, such as the techno-fears of "New Born", the hysteria of "Space Dementia" (both on Origin of Symmetry, 2001), or the End-of-the-World "Apocalypse Please" and "Time is Running Out" (both on Absolution, 2003). "Sing for Absolution", a hit single from this last album, is not genre, although the music video made to accompany the release is a high-budget short film in which the band fly a Spaceship from a dying world, crash on a desert planet, and discover at the end that it is Earth. Black Holes and Revelations (2006) is not a concept album, but works so obsessively and energetically through its fascinations (space travel, the so-called "face on Mars" and the Revelation of St John amongst others) that it sounds like one. The band's next release was a concept album, however, of sorts: the widely praised The Resistance (2009), which embroiders a future narrative through political Dystopia and environmental collapse (see Climate Change) to – in the last track, "Exogenesis" – a mass exodus from Earth to the stars, with all the shrieking, prog-like, emotive musical-dramatic bells and whistles. It manages to be both preposterously melodramatic and rather grand and moving. [AR]
The 2nd Law (2012) is another concept album, themed around environmental collapse and rising totalitarianism, in which the overt combined influences of 1970s-era Queen and David Bowie and contemporary club music offer something of a departure, while ramping up the excess to a level approaching camp. It was another huge commercial success. Drones (2015), an attempt to strip back somewhat (relatively speaking) to their original anthemic rock sound, follows a soldier who rebels against his conditioning; it edges into sf as World War Three approaches. Simulation Theory (2015), a more 1980s-inspired electronic pop album which some fans found atypically uneventful, is unburdened by a single concept, but touches on sf themes including Richard Dawkins's theories of viral thought transmission in "Thought Contagion" (see Meme), and the dying of the Sun in "The Void". The linked videos for "Something Human" and "The Dark Side" are set in a Dystopian future in which Bellamy is chased by police, drives through a Wormhole and lands on a planet populated by giant Robots. [CWa]
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