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.
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.
Muse’s inability to deliver on their return-to-form promise is frustrating because there are glimmers of what could happen if they committed entirely to either of the dual registers they often try, jarringly, to deliver all at once. The most fun to be had here is across the eight minutes of “The Sickness In You & I” and “Unravelling,” two slabs of goth-djent drowned in bucketloads of cheese. On the other end of the spectrum, “Space Debris” is a lovelorn ballad that reveals all the space stuff to be an extended metaphor for a failed relationship. The song stands on its own, but would have been more effective if the preceding songs were more 2001 than 2000 AD, and if producer Dan Lancaster had not mixed it so densely that cosmic chaos sounds like a single sustaining thud.
To promote the album’s second single, “Be With You,” Muse sent a tablet loaded with the song’s music video into the upper atmosphere and beamed it into space. With this, one is reminded of some of the first music played up there: the cassette tape of theremin music which Neil Armstrong took with him on Apollo 11 and listened to during the return from the moon. Armstrong’s choice was apt: The sound of the theremin is bewitchingly empty, mournful, and strange, both far simpler than Muse’s music and infinitely more capable of conjuring the unsettling mysteries of the universe. Expecting subtlety from Muse may seem futile, but the subject matter—be it space or heartbreak—demands it. The cosmos may be rich creative terrain, but Muse deal with the terrifying, destabilizing fact of the universe’s infinite expanse by simply trying to fill it up.
