Review

By Amanda Holborn | 02/07/2026

For much of the last decade, Muse have sounded like a band determined to escape their own legacy. Following the grand culmination of The Resistance, Matt Bellamy and company spent years chasing bigger concepts, stranger ideas and ever more bombastic production, often at the expense of the songs themselves. The Wow! Signal, however, feels like the moment they stop running. Named after the mysterious 1977 radio transmission that fuelled decades of extraterrestrial speculation, Muse's tenth album once again gazes towards the cosmos. But unlike the dystopian paranoia of recent releases, its fascination with the unknown is rooted in something more human. Bellamy uses space, distance and alien worlds as metaphors for heartbreak, loneliness and the search for connection, lending the record an emotional weight that has been missing for years. From the opening moments of The Dark Forest, Muse sound re-energised. Towering orchestration, galloping riffs and Bellamy's unmistakable falsetto recall the imperial ambition of Black Holes And Revelations without slipping into nostalgia. Rather than simply recreating past glories, the trio refine them. The highlights come thick and fast. Cryogen pairs the urgency of Plug In Baby with one of Bellamy's biggest choruses in years, while Hush – featuring Ellie Goulding – sidesteps the expected radio-friendly duet in favour of an atmospheric electro-rock slow burner that feels genuinely adventurous. Even the poppier moments, particularly Be With You, embrace melody without sacrificing the band's identity. Not everything lands. Hexagons occasionally mistakes repetition for tension, while 'Space Debris' drifts where it should soar. Yet even these weaker moments stem from creative excess rather than complacency, and that's a far more forgivable flaw. What ultimately makes The Wow! Signal so satisfying isn't its callbacks to classic-era Muse, but its renewed sense of purpose. The grandeur remains, the theatrics are as gloriously overblown as ever, and Bellamy still sings every line as though the fate of the universe depends on it. The difference is that this time the spectacle serves the songs, not the other way around. After years of searching for the next reinvention, Muse have rediscovered something far more valuable: themselves. The result is their most focused, emotionally resonant and consistently enjoyable album in well over a decade.