Muse have never been subtle, and The Wow! Signal in Space – their tenth album, out June 26 via Warner – is not the record on which they decide to start. Named after the famous 1977 radio burst that had scientists writing “Wow!” in the margins of their notes, the album arrives with appropriately dramatic fanfare: a tablet computer launched 20 miles into the atmosphere to premiere the music video for lead single “Be With You.” If you needed a shorthand for what Muse are doing here, that is it.
The album is built on the kind of cosmic anxiety and existential grandeur that the Devon trio have always done best – and often done worst. At their heights, Muse turn those instincts into something genuinely moving: “Madness,” “Uprising,” the first half of Origin of Symmetry. At their depths, the same impulses curdle into self-parody, which is a real risk when your press release describes your album as “a mix of cosmic mystery, existential hope, and the exhilarating possibility of contact with something far greater than ourselves.”
The ten tracks lean heavily into the sci-fi framework. “The Dark Forest” opens the record with the kind of synth-orchestral sweep that signals unambiguous intent. “Cryogen” and “Space Debris” are exactly what they sound like. “Nightshift Superstar” is the probable outlier, the track that might get played at 11 p.m. in a club where people are dressed wrong. “Be With You” is the accessible hook, the thing that will carry the album to radio while the deeper cuts do whatever it is Muse deep cuts do to their dedicated following, which is function as almost religious texts.
The Wow! Signal follows 2022’s Will of the People, which had ambitions that sometimes exceeded its execution. This new record suggests the band have pushed further into maximalism rather than pulling back. The Muse maximalism problem has always been the same: they write music that demands to be heard in stadiums, which means it is designed for the very experience they are trying to recreate, and the circularity of that proposition is either a feature or a bug depending on your tolerance for arena-scale earnestness.
There is a version of this album that is the best record Muse have made in a decade. There is also a version where the cosmic ambition tips into bombast one time too many and the whole thing collapses under its own conceptual weight. June 26 will tell us which one it is. Right now, “Be With You” is a strong enough opening statement that the benefit of the doubt feels earned.
Whatever else you want to say about Muse, they do not make small gestures. They launched a tablet into the stratosphere to announce this record. That is either ridiculous or genuinely wonderful, and the answer probably depends on whether The Wow! Signal in Space is actually as good as it wants to be.
