Perhaps Matt Bellamy is the greatest thinker of our age. After all, he’s spent much of Muse’s career warning us about technological conspiracies to take over the world. Yes, we thought he’d been spending too much time on the outer edges of YouTube, but he looks a bit less peculiar in the age of Cambridge Analytica. Which, naturally, is the point at which he chose to trail Muse’s eighth album with the most conventional rock-star gripe of all, on Something Human, a partially acoustic, countryish lope about how hard the life of the touring rock star is: “10,000 miles left on the road / 500 hours until I am home / I need something human.” No, Matt! Bring back the drones and the robots and the alien overlords! You can, however, perhaps see why he felt Muse needed a change. After all, there are probably only so many times you can record wildly overblown songs about your pathological dread of the power structures of a future world without wondering whether it’s a fit pastime for an adult. So Simulation Theory comes trailed as Muse’s synthpop album (it’s not), heavily inspired by the 80s (well, in its cover art; less so in much of the music). New producers are on board, among them Shellback and Timbaland, charged with finding a new face to Muse. Which they do, to a certain extent. Propaganda sounds like Muse are trying to be Prince, which isn’t entirely convincing, while Get Up and Fight bolts on a power ballad chorus to an elegantly restrained verse.
But it’s still the less poppy moments that are most exciting: the cascading arpeggios of Blockades, giving way to furious power chords. Or Algorithm, with its none-more-jackbooted synth bass line, urgent strings, and Bellamy emoting about how “algorithms evolve / Push aside / Render us obsolete / This means war.” That’s when you feel yourself seized by an unaccountable desire to march through the streets waving a massive flag, warning your neighbours that the robots are coming to kill us all.
Obviously, it would be preferable if robots weren’t coming to kill us all.
But for the sake of the gaiety of mankind, let us hope Bellamy retains the nagging suspicion that it really is going to happen. Better that than he carries on telling us life’s lonely on the road, babe.
