{"id":773056,"date":"2026-07-01T09:58:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-01T09:58:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/773056\/"},"modified":"2026-07-01T09:58:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T09:58:11","slug":"muse-the-wow-signal-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/773056\/","title":{"rendered":"Muse: The Wow! Signal Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like the supermassive black holes they once sang about, Muse<\/a>, 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<\/a>, 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\u2019s The Resistance<\/a>, though, Muse really did double down on the assumption that more is more: dabbling in whomping EDM<\/a>, hopping on the Stranger Things bandwagon<\/a>, hopping on the NFT bandwagon<\/a>, and releasing concept album after concept album on the themes of ecological collapse<\/a>, drone warfare<\/a>, \u201980s synth nostalgia<\/a>, and nonspecific, politically-Switzerland opposition to authoritarian control<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now, fresh off one of the most straightforwardly terrible albums of the decade, here comes the Muse Mothership again. This time we\u2019re 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\u2019s lightly disparaged their last two albums in the press<\/a> 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 \u201cspace\u201d and \u201cbig,\u201d and so for their 10th album, they head back to the stars and go larger on all fronts.<\/p>\n

No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n

The greatest embodiment of this confusion is opener \u201cThe Dark Forest,\u201d 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\u2019s multi-suite epic \u201cKnights of Cydonia<\/a>\u201d (complete with that song\u2019s desert-highway trot) and moves from Queen<\/a> homage to Van Halen<\/a> guitars to an actual Latin choral verse to some Meshuggah<\/a> worship without locating a single tune. These genre concoctions are beloved by Bellamy (if the Morello<\/a>\/Prince<\/a> blend of \u201cSupermassive Black Hole<\/a>\u201d sounds anything close to conventional in 2026, it\u2019s because Muse pulled that merger off with such aplomb) but the phases of \u201cThe Dark Forest\u201d just arrive one after another, rendering the band as a great, intergalactic Foxygen<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Wow! Signal is defined by the Muse Paradox: too sincere to have fun and too obnoxious to take seriously. \u201cThe Dark Forest\u201d is charming compared to the four misfires that follow. Most egregious is the torturous French-house homage of \u201cNightshift Superstar<\/a>,\u201d a tune indebted to the Timberlake-blessed whomps that represent the nadir of Timbaland\u2019s career<\/a>. The pure, post-Bee Gees charisma<\/a> Bellamy mustered in the 2000s seems to have vacated him entirely, and the song\u2019s funkiness suffocates under the flatness of his delivery.<\/p>\n

Bellamy\u2019s voice is one of The Wow! Signal\u2019s several albatrosses. There\u2019s something genuinely affecting, for example, about the words of unadorned agony on \u201cShimmering Scars\u201d (\u201cAll I ever dreamed of has fled to the stars\u2026\/Everyone I reached for, they tear me apart\u201d) 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, \u201cCryogen\u201d is built around a quagmire of abysmal sixth-form poetry with howler lines like, \u201cYeah, this girl is nitrogen\u2026 Cryogen\/I can never cry again\u201d\u2014and his delivery suits those just fine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Like the supermassive black holes they once sang about, Muse, too, have been collapsing in on themselves thanks…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":773057,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[342,49,48,75,341,343],"class_list":["post-773056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-albums","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=773056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773056\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/773057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=773056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=773056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=773056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}