Muse – *The Wow! Signal*: space rock icons' best album in 20 years

Muse have made their best album since Black Holes and Revelations and it isn't particularly close.

That's not a statement we expected to write. The last decade of Muse records has been... fine. Drones had moments. Simulation Theory had a look. Will of the People had ambition it couldn't quite execute. None of them hit like they used to. None of them felt necessary.

The Wow! Signal feels necessary.

What changed

Matt Bellamy stopped trying to make a statement album and just made a Muse album. The difference is everything.

The title references the 1977 radio signal that still hasn't been explained — a 72-second burst from deep space that no one's accounted for. It's the right metaphor. This record arrives with that same energy: loud, strange, unexplained, impossible to ignore.

Production-wise, it's the closest thing to Origin of Symmetry textures they've achieved since that era. The synths are thick but not plastic. The guitars are back in the mix properly — not buried under layers of glossy sheen like they were on Simulation Theory. You can hear Bellamy's fingers on the strings. That matters.

The tracks that land

Opening track 'Fermi Paradox' hits immediately. Big riff, bigger chorus, and a vocal line that actually sits in Bellamy's natural register rather than performing above it. He sounds comfortable. He sounds dangerous. That combination went missing for a while.

'Dead Zones' is the single and it earns that position. The bass work from Chris Wolstenholme carries the verse on its own — it reminds you he's one of the most underrated bassists in British rock, full stop. The pre-chorus drops into near-silence before the chorus detonates. Old trick. Still works when it's done properly.

'Kardashev' is the album's centrepiece at seven minutes. It builds slowly — too slowly for some, but the payoff justifies it. Bellamy's falsetto in the final ninety seconds is the best thing he's put on record since 'Exogenesis'. That's not nostalgia talking. That's just honest.

'Low Frequency Ghost' is where the prog instincts fully kick in. Odd time signatures, a middle section that feels like it's about to collapse, and then Dominic Howard pulling everything back together with a drum pattern that sounds deceptively simple. It isn't. Play it back and count it. The man is technically elite.

Where it's not perfect

Two tracks in the middle third overstay their welcome. 'Signal Decay' and 'The Observatory' both have strong ideas that get stretched across five minutes when three would've been sharper. It's the only moment on the album where old habits creep back in — the tendency to equate length with depth.

It costs them. Not badly. But it's there.

Why this record works when the others didn't

The band played these songs live before they were fully finished. You can feel it. There's a looseness to the performances — controlled looseness, not sloppiness — that's been absent from Muse records for years. Studio albums have a tendency to get ironed flat. The Wow! Signal kept its creases.

The production credit belongs partly to Bellamy himself, working alongside a stripped-back team. Fewer cooks. Better broth.

It also helps that the album is 47 minutes long. That's it. No sprawl. No bonus track padding. In, out, done.

Our verdict

The Wow! Signal is a reminder that Muse at their best are genuinely untouchable in British rock. Nobody else does this — the scale, the drama, the technical execution. When it connects, there's nothing like it.

This connects.

Not every track is perfect. The midsection drags slightly. But the peaks here — 'Fermi Paradox', 'Dead Zones', 'Kardashev' — are as good as anything they've released since 2006. We're not grading on a curve. We're just calling it as we hear it.

Muse are back. Properly back.

9/10

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Image via [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse_(band)) / Wikimedia Commons