Like the supermassive black holes they once sang about, Muse, too, have been collapsing in on themselves thanks to their own ludicrous gravity. Music historians tend to overstate the timeframe of this terminal condition; the band always had plenty of pomp and ceremony but, at its best, that brashness was paired with a poise which made you feel like the ship was at least being steadied by an able captain. Somewhere around the point of 2009’s The Resistance, though, Muse really did double down on the assumption that more is more: dabbling in whomping EDM, hopping on the Stranger Things bandwagon, hopping on the NFT bandwagon, and releasing concept album after concept album on the themes of ecological collapse, drone warfare, ’80s synth nostalgia, and nonspecific, politically-Switzerland opposition to authoritarian control.
Now, fresh off one of the most straightforwardly terrible albums of the decade, here comes the Muse Mothership again. This time we’re back in space. The Wow! Signal, titled after an unexplained frequency detected by radio telescope at Ohio State University in 1977, has Return To Form written all over it, down to the lead singer who’s lightly disparaged their last two albums in the press and loudly embraced back-to-basics intuition. But because this is Muse, the first two words to conjure the essence of their heyday are most likely “space” and “big,” and so for their 10th album, they head back to the stars and go larger on all fronts.
No score yet, be the first to add.
The greatest embodiment of this confusion is opener “The Dark Forest,” a song which advertises its own scale by featuring both the Crouch End Festival Chorus and the London Metropolitan Orchestra. It acts as a sequel to 2006’s multi-suite epic “Knights of Cydonia” (complete with that song’s desert-highway trot) and moves from Queen homage to Van Halen guitars to an actual Latin choral verse to some Meshuggah worship without locating a single tune. These genre concoctions are beloved by Bellamy (if the Morello/Prince blend of “Supermassive Black Hole” sounds anything close to conventional in 2026, it’s because Muse pulled that merger off with such aplomb) but the phases of “The Dark Forest” just arrive one after another, rendering the band as a great, intergalactic Foxygen.
The Wow! Signal is defined by the Muse Paradox: too sincere to have fun and too obnoxious to take seriously. “The Dark Forest” is charming compared to the four misfires that follow. Most egregious is the torturous French-house homage of “Nightshift Superstar,” a tune indebted to the Timberlake-blessed whomps that represent the nadir of Timbaland’s career. The pure, post-Bee Gees charisma Bellamy mustered in the 2000s seems to have vacated him entirely, and the song’s funkiness suffocates under the flatness of his delivery.
Bellamy’s voice is one of The Wow! Signal’s several albatrosses. There’s something genuinely affecting, for example, about the words of unadorned agony on “Shimmering Scars” (“All I ever dreamed of has fled to the stars…/Everyone I reached for, they tear me apart”) but their poignancy is lost on the man who wrote them, who sings them like Freddie Mercury being squeezed through a tube of toothpaste. On the other hand, “Cryogen” is built around a quagmire of abysmal sixth-form poetry with howler lines like, “Yeah, this girl is nitrogen… Cryogen/I can never cry again”—and his delivery suits those just fine.
