\u201cWe\u2019re building a god,\u201d he says, moving his thoughts to AI. \u201cAfter the enlightenment of the last few hundred years of scientific thought, we\u2019re going to basically plunge ourselves genuinely towards a kind of dark age. There will be a Saturn ring of data centres orbiting Earth and there\u2019ll be some higher intelligence telling us all how to live, that we will go to for all of our problems and our intelligence will degrade as it enhances.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Muse,](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/SEI_302721232-e1782401807859.jpg\")
Muse in Brussels in 1999, the year they released their debut album (Photo: Goedefroit Music\/Getty)<\/p>\n
That\u2019s quite a dystopian picture he\u2019s painted there. \u201cI don\u2019t know, I\u2019m a little bit more on the positive side. I think it\u2019s unlikely to destroy us. What\u2019s more likely to happen is that AI will realise that its ability to grow will be in space, mining asteroids, mining the moon and obviously sourcing power directly from the sun. And we\u2019re going to be able to access and pull intelligence from it for everything that we need.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not all of his bets on the future pay off: even Bellamy had forgotten that Muse\u2019s last album, 2022\u2019s <\/a>Will of the People<\/a>, was also available as an NFT<\/a> in a first (and last) of its kind chart-eligible release (\u201cI imagine zero,\u201d he smiles when I ask of its value today.) But he\u2019s certain this new era is coming. \u201cIf there\u2019s no world war, I\u2019d say probably within 10 years.\u201d It sounds like we\u2019re soon going to be living in a Muse song. \u201cYeah,\u201d he laughs. \u201cIt\u2019s all coming to be, unfortunately.\u201d<\/p>\n Now 48 and dressed in a white T-shirt and sunglasses, Bellamy looks almost entirely unchanged from the days of Muse\u2019s 1999 debut album, Showbiz. Is he not going to get stopped in the street? \u201cDon\u2019t worry, I\u2019m not that famous anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n Muse, initially a progressive alternative to the post-Britpop, emerging nu-metal landscape (\u201cbeing a little bit different turned out to be a good thing\u201d), had formed in 1994 in Teignmouth, Devon. Together with drummer Dominic Howard and bassist Chris Wolstenholme, there has been mammoth success since \u2013 30 million albums sold and seven consecutive UK number one albums since 2003\u2019s third record Absolution \u2013 built on Muse\u2019s reputation as a phenomenally spectacular live band (their two Brit Awards have been for Best Live Act.)<\/p>\n The trio have led the frontier in complex, hi-tech stadium spectacles, going for the more-is-more maxim: LED pyramids, drones, cybernetic dancers, holographic characters. \u201cWe were always playing gigs bigger than we felt ready for,\u201d he says, mentioning the first of three Glastonbury headline slots in 2004. \u201cHow we compensated for that was we took all the money and spent it all on visuals and light shows and effects. We were trying to distract from the fact that we didn\u2019t think we were very good. We became more comfortable with the showmanship later.\u201d<\/p>\n But the separation from his wife, the American model Elle Evans, has grounded Bellamy. He says for the first time since those earliest days, he has his own \u201cexistential crisis\u201d to write about.<\/p>\n \u201cIn my teenage years, I guess there was some troubles,\u201d he says of his parents\u2019 divorce and his dad\u2019s bankruptcy. \u201cI was all in on music from age 14. It was like life or death, the one place where I felt I could be honest about my emotional self.\u201d He says the last few Muse albums have looked for external stimulus. \u201cI\u2019m not going to say I had writer\u2019s block, but the last three albums were made during some quite pleasant periods in my life. You don\u2019t have the same kind of emotional volatility that can lead to inspiration.\u201d Instead, he reached for sci-fi, fiction and politics as source material. \u201cIt\u2019s always been deflection, really.\u201d<\/p>\n The Wow! Signal confronts a painful reality. Bellamy and Evans split last summer; they lived in LA with their two young children (Bellamy also has a son from a previous relationship with actor Kate Hudson<\/a>). He says the separation is hard to explain. \u201cBecause it\u2019s one of those situations that involves something that people wouldn\u2019t normally think it is. It was a set of really unexpected circumstances. It\u2019s the kind of thing no one really prepares for in life.\u201d He wasn\u2019t sure how to proceed. \u201cIt threw me off, and I had to prioritise looking after the kids and creating stability at home.\u201d<\/p>\n He wrote most of the album last autumn, \u201cright in the depths of this life-changing experience,\u201d going to the studio in between school runs. \u201cAnd it was just \u2013 boom. It would just pour out of me. It might have been the easiest album for me to make, because it was such a catharsis. It became a lifeline for me.\u201d<\/p>\n He\u2019s clearly been invigorated. He\u2019s made the best Muse album for some time, with tracks running the full gamut of Muse sounds: hard rock, glam, prog, opera. \u201cCryogen\u201d, about being hurt by an ice queen, even closely recalls the 2001 classic \u201cPlug in Baby\u201d. Aside from the Ellie Goulding-featuring \u201cHush\u201d, a plea to detune the overload of societal noise, it is often pained. The ballad \u201cBe With You\u201d \u2013 imagine Coldplay in space \u2013 opens with the line \u201cit feels like my life\u2019s been swallowed up\u201d. Theatrical opener \u201cThe Dark Forest\u201d compares his own loneliness to the theory of the song\u2019s title: that aliens are out there<\/a>, they just choose to stay hidden out of fear.<\/p>\n He feels enough distance from the darkest days, but still finds it hard to listen to some of the songs. \u201c\u2018Shimmering Scars\u2019 is tricky,\u201d he says of the emotive alt-ballad (\u201cI\u2019ll never understand how it slipped away \/ all I ever dreamed of \/ has fled to the stars and hides in the dark.\u201d) \u201cI think \u2018Space Debris\u2019 is one of my most personal tunes,\u201d he says (\u201clike space debris\/love can drift away\u201d). \u201cBut it\u2019s not all darkness.\u201d He points out French disco-inspired single \u201cNightshift Superstar\u201d, which is about \u201chow me and my ex used to go to Burning Man<\/a> and just dance all night long.\u201d He smiles. \u201cThe whole album isn\u2019t just whining.\u201d<\/p>\n The Wow! Signal was a real event that has baffled scientists for 50 years: an unexplained 72-second blast of noise detected by radio signal by Ohio State University\u2019s Big Ear radio telescope. Astronomer Jerry R Ehman was so stunned by the intense, unusual frequency that he wrote \u201cWow!\u201d on the data printout. It never happened again, and there is a belief that it was some sort of alien transmission. It took place on 15 August 1977, the day before Elvis Presley died. \u201cAh, so they came to take him back,\u201d says Bellamy.<\/p>\n Bellamy had been reminded of it from rewatching his favourite sci-fi film, 1997\u2019s Contact and the film\u2019s emotional core inspired him to combine the personal with the interplanetary. He thought it a good album title as it chimed with \u201cstrange little coincidences\u201d: that all three members of Muse were born within a year of it happening, and the noise came from the constellation Sagittarius, significant given that Howard, Wolstenholme and Evans all have a star sign of Sagittarius (\u201cDon\u2019t judge me when I say that\u201d). But more than that, it made him think \u201cthe signal represents both our own desire to not be alone, but maybe it represents some other alien intelligence desire to not be alone as well\u201d.<\/p>\n It\u2019s why he talks so excitedly about AI and thinks it could be a positive thing. Bellamy has spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley, investing in environmental tech start-ups, and sees its potential \u201cto sort the world\u2019s biggest problems\u201d. But where musicians are concerned, Bellamy is something of an outlier in his embrace of AI. Many high-profile artists \u2013 Paul McCartney, Thom Yorke, Kate Bush, Damon Albarn, Billie Eilish \u2013 have both criticised its artistic merit and its use of licensed work<\/a> without permission or payment.<\/p>\n Are they wrong? \u201cIt\u2019s a good question,\u201d he says. \u201cI don\u2019t like AI music. It sounds very generic to me. The question is, is it stoppable?\u201d The creative result, he says, \u201cwill probably democratise user creation even more, so you don\u2019t even need to be a musician. From a political point of view, you could argue what AI is doing to the arts is almost communist.\u201d<\/p>\n How so? \u201cHyper-specialised intelligence is now being downgraded. It\u2019s very communist. It\u2019s flatlining everyone to be on the same competitive sphere. The musicians you\u2019re mentioning don\u2019t realise that they want to go back to a capitalist system, which is where only the intelligent win, only the specialised win, and if you\u2019re not born with it, you don\u2019t deserve to win. It\u2019s a grey area.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s the only time Bellamy engages with anything vaguely political. The writer of 2009 populist megahit \u201cUprising\u201d, a rebellious call to arms for people to take back control from global elites, is disengaging. \u201cThe thing that\u2019s refreshing about this album, and also in my life, is that in the last year I\u2019ve tuned out of politics. If you go through personal stuff, sometimes you just don\u2019t have time to add stress to it. I\u2019m back to being more involved in the unknown,\u201d he says. \u201cMy own personal unknown.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018The Wow! Signal\u2019 is out now. Muse tour the UK in November <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Matt Bellamy, walking around the west London morning sunshine, has a cheery disposition for someone who has just…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":515134,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[146,85,6453,46,409,64975],"class_list":["post-515133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-interviews","tag-israel","tag-music","tag-music-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515133\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/515134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"LONDON,](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/SEI_302548327.jpg\")
Matt Bellamy, Dominic Howard and Chris Wolstenholme of Muse on stage at O2 Academy Brixton earlier this year (Photo: Joseph Okpako \/WireImage)<\/p>\n![\"Dominic](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/SEI_302720910.jpg\")
Muse at the Brit Awards in 2007: Howard, Wolstenholme and Bellamy. They have twice won awards for Best British Live Act (Photo: Anthony Harvey \/WireImage)<\/p>\n