Muse is back!
Well, to be fair, I don’t know if they ever really left. I stopped paying attention sometime around The 2nd Law when it was apparent the band was trying too hard. As it turned out, 2009’s The Resistance was the turning point for the band, with it and everything after dabbling in political themes, pop/rock bombast and symphonic bloat with unspecific messaging.
But The WOW! Signal, which takes its title from an alleged extraterrestrial communication with a university researcher back in the 1970s, seems to do away with much of the politics this time and instead focuses on space themes. The ’09 song “Uprising” was used effectively in the alien-invasion miniseries V on ABC around the same time, and that is Muse’s sweet spot more than anything they have to say about masks or the will of the people or authoritarianism being a bad idea. 
Few bands have the will or ability to attempt an opener like “The Dark Forest,” which offers a galloping beat, choral and string arrangements and Matt Bellamy’s histrionics all within the first minute, then halfway through drops out to just a chugging electric guitar strum before the drums and a chorus chanting in Latin (why not?) lead back into the main riff. The noise swirls around in grand Muse fashion (with a hint of Queen) and the whole thing ends in only five minutes, a sci-fi epic in miniature.
But then things pivot abruptly into the disco-pop of “Nightshift Superstar,” the modern rock balladry of “Shimmering Scars” and the more straightforward “Cryogen,” which is a return to the guitar-heavy Muse sound of old. “Be With You” unfolds as a rather dull gospel-like ballad, joined halfway through by an electronic beat and then the layers of guitars. You have to really like walls of sound to get through a Muse album.
The electronic math rock underpinnings of “Hexagons” turn this into something of a video-game nerd rock (something about six dimensions and Saturn), and it’s quintessential Muse, as is the noisy single “Unravelling,” which goes in a dozen directions with absolute confidence. Indeed, this album debuted at #1 in the UK when it was released, which is quite the feat for a band 10 albums deep that has been struggling as of late.
Ellie Goulding makes an appearance on “Hush,” adding a counterpoint over an industrial beat to Bellamy’s vocals, and one wonders why the band hadn’t thought of this before. Closer “Space Debris” falls short of the rest, meandering around until it finally ends, but it’s offset by “The Sickness In You & I,” which grinds a detuned bass riff in and out of a cacophony of noise and flourishes, yet another exercise in pulling approaches from different genres into Muse’s spacy operatic approach.
One has to admire a trio that can not only make this much noise but also lean into the ridiculousness of it all. The WOW! Signal is an admirable, borderline absurd effort that sees Muse continuing to push forward while also recalling some of the better elements of their early-2000s sound. And by not trying too hard to say something, the band has wound up saying plenty this time out.