The Wow! Signal      Artist: MuseLabel: Warner RecordsIf there’s one precious commodity rock music has allowed to slip by the wayside over the past several decades, it’s the ability to be eyes-on-stalks ridiculous without feeling in the least self-conscious or apologetic about it. Such was the superpower of Queen in their prime: they’d never have got anywhere had Freddie Mercury been bothered about impressing the sort of people who ran for the hills at first sight of a sequinned jumpsuit.Our ability to appreciate a wildly over-the-top rock band is now sadly diminished, although this is obviously news to Muse, inheritors of Queen’s title as the silliest troupe on this or any other plane of existence. Always happiest when going barkingly over the top, the English trio are at their bonkers best on their 10th album, The Wow! Signal, a glam odyssey that fuses metal, techno, science fiction and prog rock into an overstuffed inferno of absurdity.The LP is never even vaguely aware of how hysterical it is – which is precisely as it should be. The best thing about Muse is their fearlessness. Or, if you prefer, their willingness to come across as rockers who are off their rockers, which is the default setting for this project named after a radio signal sent pinging into space in the late 1970s in the hope of detecting alien life.Science-fiction maximalism is hard-wired into every note. Muse make that clear from the outset: the album’s opener, The Dark Forest, is a prog stomper that references the hypothesis that space is full of alien intelligence but that the sheer vastness of the cosmos makes it unlikely they will ever cross our paths.Unfiltered Muse, this song will please fans of the band’s grandiose back catalogue, which includes tunes such as Supermassive Black Hole, a banger that sounded as if Prince had a PhD in astrophysics. Matt Bellamy, their singer, is out in deep space again, wondering at the emptiness of it all. “Stars extinguish themselves out of fear,” he howls in his Thom Yorke-has-an-out-of-body-experience falsetto. “A beacon that can’t light the darkness.”But there’s fun to go with the portentousness, as Muse spell out on Nightshift Superstar, a sci-fi disco epic that sounds like Daft Punk trapped inside a groundbreaking PlayStation game from 1996. Propelled ever onwards by the pile-driver riffs of Chris Wolstenholme, their bassist (a former Dublin resident), it’s as vast as the Antares nebula and as shiny and childlike as a toy replica of the Starship Enterprise.Muse aren’t ones for reinventing the wheel, and the monster-truck vibes continue with Cryogen, a Queen-style onslaught with explosive guitars and a headbanging chorus, and which earns bonus marks for Bellamy’s decision to rhyme “cryogen” with “cry again”.The Wow! Signal isn’t original – Pink Floyd might like a word about Hexagons – and it doesn’t ever pretend to be so. Which is Muse’s great strength. They remain so far beyond embarrassment as to inhabit another dimension entirely. (Likewise beyond embarrassment are Muse’s label, which declined to provide a review copy in advance.)Bellamy has, through his career, been fuelled with the angst of a teenager dreaming of the life beyond his bedroom. He stays in that register even on an album informed by the challenges of adult life – specifically his separation from his wife, Elle Evans. Not that you’d guess real-life heartache was an influence on the record. He’s doing what he has always done, singing about the sort of intergalactic phenomena you’d typically encounter only in a Christopher Nolan film or a YouTube video about the rings of Saturn.Is it for everyone? Absolutely not. This is Imax pop: blaring, caught up in itself and not given to pausing for breath. But it does commit, and the absence of self-doubt – its lack of familiarity with the very concept – is refreshing, even if sensitive listeners are advised to don a crash helmet before venturing close.The nearest the album comes to being explicitly political is on Hush, a high-octane, Nine Inch Nails-adjacent duet with Ellie Goulding. Here, Bellamy laments the intrusion of technology on our lives – a plague, he argues, that has robbed us of one of the most important experiences we can have as humans, which is to bask in silence (“it’s getting too loud, don’t drown us out”).Still, you can’t keep a prog warrior down, and with the LP’s closer, Space Debris, we’re back in a sci-fi neverland for a power ballad that unfolds like Stanley Kubrick playing Warhammer 40,000 and inviting Snow Patrol to chronicle his adventures. Ludicrous but great fun, it’s a gravity-defying sound only Muse can make.