Matt Bellamy, walking around the west London morning sunshine, has a cheery disposition for someone who has just made an album “coming from a place entirely of personal emotional turmoil”.
Muse’s 10th album, The Wow! Signal, is a break-up record. But it’s not that simple. This is Muse, bombastic space-rock behemoths with over 25 years of songs that explore themes of extraterrestrial life, sci-fi apocalypse, simulated realities, deep states, drone warfare and political revolt.
So the album’s uncharacteristically raw directness was always going to be offset. Bellamy is extrapolating his own loneliness and the need to belong to that of alien life – The Wow! Signal is a famous blast of unexplained noise rumoured to be alien communication – and humanity’s search for meaning. He’s asking the big questions. “Why do we have this deep desire for there to be a higher power?” he asks with his breakneck speaking pace where ideas and theories constantly tumble into each other.
“We’re building a god,” he says, moving his thoughts to AI. “After the enlightenment of the last few hundred years of scientific thought, we’re going to basically plunge ourselves genuinely towards a kind of dark age. There will be a Saturn ring of data centres orbiting Earth and there’ll be some higher intelligence telling us all how to live, that we will go to for all of our problems and our intelligence will degrade as it enhances.”
Muse in Brussels in 1999, the year they released their debut album (Photo: Goedefroit Music/Getty)That’s quite a dystopian picture he’s painted there. “I don’t know, I’m a little bit more on the positive side. I think it’s unlikely to destroy us. What’s more likely to happen is that AI will realise that its ability to grow will be in space, mining asteroids, mining the moon and obviously sourcing power directly from the sun. And we’re going to be able to access and pull intelligence from it for everything that we need.”
Not all of his bets on the future pay off: even Bellamy had forgotten that Muse’s last album, 2022’s Will of the People, was also available as an NFT in a first (and last) of its kind chart-eligible release (“I imagine zero,” he smiles when I ask of its value today.) But he’s certain this new era is coming. “If there’s no world war, I’d say probably within 10 years.” It sounds like we’re soon going to be living in a Muse song. “Yeah,” he laughs. “It’s all coming to be, unfortunately.”
Now 48 and dressed in a white T-shirt and sunglasses, Bellamy looks almost entirely unchanged from the days of Muse’s 1999 debut album, Showbiz. Is he not going to get stopped in the street? “Don’t worry, I’m not that famous anymore.”
Muse, initially a progressive alternative to the post-Britpop, emerging nu-metal landscape (“being a little bit different turned out to be a good thing”), had formed in 1994 in Teignmouth, Devon. Together with drummer Dominic Howard and bassist Chris Wolstenholme, there has been mammoth success since – 30 million albums sold and seven consecutive UK number one albums since 2003’s third record Absolution – built on Muse’s reputation as a phenomenally spectacular live band (their two Brit Awards have been for Best Live Act.)
The trio have led the frontier in complex, hi-tech stadium spectacles, going for the more-is-more maxim: LED pyramids, drones, cybernetic dancers, holographic characters. “We were always playing gigs bigger than we felt ready for,” he says, mentioning the first of three Glastonbury headline slots in 2004. “How we compensated for that was we took all the money and spent it all on visuals and light shows and effects. We were trying to distract from the fact that we didn’t think we were very good. We became more comfortable with the showmanship later.”
Matt Bellamy, Dominic Howard and Chris Wolstenholme of Muse on stage at O2 Academy Brixton earlier this year (Photo: Joseph Okpako /WireImage)But the separation from his wife, the American model Elle Evans, has grounded Bellamy. He says for the first time since those earliest days, he has his own “existential crisis” to write about.
“In my teenage years, I guess there was some troubles,” he says of his parents’ divorce and his dad’s bankruptcy. “I was all in on music from age 14. It was like life or death, the one place where I felt I could be honest about my emotional self.” He says the last few Muse albums have looked for external stimulus. “I’m not going to say I had writer’s block, but the last three albums were made during some quite pleasant periods in my life. You don’t have the same kind of emotional volatility that can lead to inspiration.” Instead, he reached for sci-fi, fiction and politics as source material. “It’s always been deflection, really.”
The Wow! Signal confronts a painful reality. Bellamy and Evans split last summer; they lived in LA with their two young children (Bellamy also has a son from a previous relationship with actor Kate Hudson). He says the separation is hard to explain. “Because it’s one of those situations that involves something that people wouldn’t normally think it is. It was a set of really unexpected circumstances. It’s the kind of thing no one really prepares for in life.” He wasn’t sure how to proceed. “It threw me off, and I had to prioritise looking after the kids and creating stability at home.”
He wrote most of the album last autumn, “right in the depths of this life-changing experience,” going to the studio in between school runs. “And it was just – boom. It would just pour out of me. It might have been the easiest album for me to make, because it was such a catharsis. It became a lifeline for me.”
He’s clearly been invigorated. He’s made the best Muse album for some time, with tracks running the full gamut of Muse sounds: hard rock, glam, prog, opera. “Cryogen”, about being hurt by an ice queen, even closely recalls the 2001 classic “Plug in Baby”. Aside from the Ellie Goulding-featuring “Hush”, a plea to detune the overload of societal noise, it is often pained. The ballad “Be With You” – imagine Coldplay in space – opens with the line “it feels like my life’s been swallowed up”. Theatrical opener “The Dark Forest” compares his own loneliness to the theory of the song’s title: that aliens are out there, they just choose to stay hidden out of fear.
Muse at the Brit Awards in 2007: Howard, Wolstenholme and Bellamy. They have twice won awards for Best British Live Act (Photo: Anthony Harvey /WireImage)He feels enough distance from the darkest days, but still finds it hard to listen to some of the songs. “‘Shimmering Scars’ is tricky,” he says of the emotive alt-ballad (“I’ll never understand how it slipped away / all I ever dreamed of / has fled to the stars and hides in the dark.”) “I think ‘Space Debris’ is one of my most personal tunes,” he says (“like space debris/love can drift away”). “But it’s not all darkness.” He points out French disco-inspired single “Nightshift Superstar”, which is about “how me and my ex used to go to Burning Man and just dance all night long.” He smiles. “The whole album isn’t just whining.”
The Wow! Signal was a real event that has baffled scientists for 50 years: an unexplained 72-second blast of noise detected by radio signal by Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope. Astronomer Jerry R Ehman was so stunned by the intense, unusual frequency that he wrote “Wow!” on the data printout. It never happened again, and there is a belief that it was some sort of alien transmission. It took place on 15 August 1977, the day before Elvis Presley died. “Ah, so they came to take him back,” says Bellamy.
Bellamy had been reminded of it from rewatching his favourite sci-fi film, 1997’s Contact and the film’s emotional core inspired him to combine the personal with the interplanetary. He thought it a good album title as it chimed with “strange little coincidences”: that all three members of Muse were born within a year of it happening, and the noise came from the constellation Sagittarius, significant given that Howard, Wolstenholme and Evans all have a star sign of Sagittarius (“Don’t judge me when I say that”). But more than that, it made him think “the signal represents both our own desire to not be alone, but maybe it represents some other alien intelligence desire to not be alone as well”.
It’s why he talks so excitedly about AI and thinks it could be a positive thing. Bellamy has spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley, investing in environmental tech start-ups, and sees its potential “to sort the world’s biggest problems”. But where musicians are concerned, Bellamy is something of an outlier in his embrace of AI. Many high-profile artists – Paul McCartney, Thom Yorke, Kate Bush, Damon Albarn, Billie Eilish – have both criticised its artistic merit and its use of licensed work without permission or payment.
Are they wrong? “It’s a good question,” he says. “I don’t like AI music. It sounds very generic to me. The question is, is it stoppable?” The creative result, he says, “will probably democratise user creation even more, so you don’t even need to be a musician. From a political point of view, you could argue what AI is doing to the arts is almost communist.”
How so? “Hyper-specialised intelligence is now being downgraded. It’s very communist. It’s flatlining everyone to be on the same competitive sphere. The musicians you’re mentioning don’t realise that they want to go back to a capitalist system, which is where only the intelligent win, only the specialised win, and if you’re not born with it, you don’t deserve to win. It’s a grey area.”
It’s the only time Bellamy engages with anything vaguely political. The writer of 2009 populist megahit “Uprising”, a rebellious call to arms for people to take back control from global elites, is disengaging. “The thing that’s refreshing about this album, and also in my life, is that in the last year I’ve tuned out of politics. If you go through personal stuff, sometimes you just don’t have time to add stress to it. I’m back to being more involved in the unknown,” he says. “My own personal unknown.”
‘The Wow! Signal’ is out now. Muse tour the UK in November
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