Muse’s The Wow! Signal makes stadium rock sound like the future again

Muse don’t often make records that beg to be ignored. The Wow! Signal, their tenth studio album, is certainly not one of them: ten tracks built around the kind of grand, cathedral-sized sound the band made their name with, delivered with more conviction than anything since Black Holes and Revelations.

The album’s title comes from the strongest candidate for an extraterrestrial radio signal ever recorded — a brief, unexplained burst detected by a radio telescope in Ohio that scientists have never been able to fully account for. Muse take the title’s ambiguity and run with it. This is not a nostalgia record. It is an attempt to reclaim the band’s most ambitious register and carry it somewhere it hasn’t quite been before.

The album’s opening argument is Nightshift Superstar, the lead single, and it makes its case in the first 30 seconds. Chris Wolstenholme’s bassline is the kind of riff that earns the song its radio time: a throbbing, physical groove that sits somewhere between Justice and Daft Punk but sounds like nobody other than Muse. Matt Bellamy’s falsetto rides it without effort. The comparison to Supermassive Black Hole is obvious and accurate — except Nightshift Superstar is rawer, less in love with its own cleverness, and harder to shake.

Not everything on The Wow! Signal earns the same confidence. The Sickness In You & I and Unravelling deliver the expected Muse textures without the surprise that makes the album’s best moments land so hard. Hush, a duet with Ellie Goulding, sits in an uneasy space between pop crossover and genuine experiment, without fully committing to either. Listeners expecting a full reinvention will find these tracks frustrating.

The album’s real strength is its cosmic middle section — Hexagons, Cryogen, and Space Debris — where Muse build atmosphere and complexity the way they did on their defining records. These are not retreads. They are Muse making good on a promise the band has been quietly building toward.

With The Wow! Signal, Muse demonstrate that the rock band as spectacle can still mean something when the craft is genuinely there. A tenth album that makes the case this cleanly is harder to pull off than it looks.

The Wow! Signal was released via Warner Records and the band’s own Helium-3 label. No tour dates have been announced.

Tags: rock, alternative rock, Muse, The Wow! Signal