There is nothing new in Muse's tenth album, nothing capable of leaving us breathless or making us fall out of our chairs: sonic maximalism supported by choirs and orchestra, acrobatic guitars, grandeur hyper-kitsch, sometimes exasperating technicality, some pleasant twists electro which always lasts too short. All very comfortable for fans who love theirs trademark, not so much for those who can't stand the craving for gigantism and self-referentiality typical of Matt Bellamy and co.
From the opening “The Dark Forest” you are assailed by the idea of a real blockbuster that will accompany the listener for the next three quarters of an hour. Inside “The Wow! Signal” there is the yearning for the end of Bellamy's marriage to the model and actress Elle Evans (the two had two children), represented by means of a cosmic parallel: the loneliness of man like the loneliness of a lost planet or of a meteorite that wanders without inertia in sidereal space.
The most successful moments of “The Wow! Signal”, or at least the most immediate and recognizable ones, are “Cryogen”, a direct descendant of “Plug In Baby”, one of the songs most loved by their fans, and “Unravelling”, already released as a single in June last year, two decidedly successful episodes, but which tend to resemble various other songs already recorded in the past by Muse.
Among tracks that start off melancholy intimate and then ripple along the way (“Shimmering Scars”, “Be With You”), the never-settled grandiloquent passion for prog structures (“Hexagons”), some drift dance-funk oriented (“Nightshift Superstar”), riff and falsettos that flow into power pop choruses (“The Sickness In You & I”), even a featuring negligible (that of Ellie Goulding in “Hush”), “The Wow! Signal” stands out as a fun album that will certainly find its sublimation in live transposition. But when we first heard “Showbiz” or “Origin Of Simmethry”, we imagined a very different future for Muse.
06/29/2026
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
