Matt Bellamy, walking around the west London morning sunshine, has a cheery disposition for someone who has just made an album “coming from a place entirely of personal emotional turmoil”.
Muse’s 10th album, The Wow! Signal, is a break-up record. But it’s not that simple. This is Muse, bombastic space-rock behemoths with over 25 years of songs that explore themes of extraterrestrial life, sci-fi apocalypse, simulated realities, deep states, drone warfare and political revolt.
So the album’s uncharacteristically raw directness was always going to be offset. Bellamy is extrapolating his own loneliness and the need to belong to that of alien life – The Wow! Signal is a famous blast of unexplained noise rumoured to be alien communication – and humanity’s search for meaning. He’s asking the big questions. “Why do we have this deep desire for there to be a higher power?” he asks with his breakneck speaking pace where ideas and theories constantly tumble into each other.
“We’re building a god,” he says, moving his thoughts to AI. “After the enlightenment of the last few hundred years of scientific thought, we’re 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’ll 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.”
