The mystery of Muse: if almost no one likes them, why do so many people go to their concerts?

Few musical confessions are as awkward as admitting you like Muse. The British band has spent more than two decades filling stadiums and writing some of the most recognizable anthems of 21st-century rock, yet it has never achieved something that, on paper, should have been much easier: prestige. For Muse, success has never served as an argument in their favor. Quite the opposite. The bigger the band has become, the easier it has been to ridicule them.

What’s striking is that this rejection has rarely had much to do with Muse’s vocalist and leader, Matt Bellamy. Unlike other stadium-rock frontmen, his figure hardly provokes any hostility offstage. What makes people uncomfortable about Muse is the band’s very nature. They have never felt the need to tone down their ambition. Their songs are heroic, theatrical and excessive. They address surveillance, conspiracies, artificial intelligence and apocalypse with a conviction that now feels almost anachronistic. While much of rock has learned to avoid grandiosity, Muse have never stopped embracing it.

And yet that gamble has never hurt them. Almost three decades after Showbiz, Muse still sell out tickets, headline festivals and place their records among the U.K.’s best-sellers. The Wow! Signal confirms that their drawing power remains intact. What’s unusual is that their success has never been accompanied by critical consensus. Each new album reopens the same debate: for some, Muse represent one of contemporary rock’s most singular propositions; for others, they are repeating the same old excesses.

That split is somewhat paradoxical. Everything Muse has been mocked for over the years — Bellamy’s impossible falsetto, the influence of Queen and Rachmaninov, their theatricality and their messianic lyrics — is precisely what their fans consider indispensable. What some dismiss as bombastic, others experience as an almost cathartic encounter.

The problem has never been only the content of their songs, but the way the band presents itself. Bellamy is far from the classic rock archetype. He sings in an almost operatic register and turns each song into a small spectacle. Often it seems like Muse are parodying themselves, but the reality is their approach contains not a shred of irony — they are completely earnest.

The Wow! Signal does not tone down any of the traits that have made Muse such a divisive band. The mammoth guitars, the impossible falsettos, the stadium-sized melodies and a concept that looks to the heavens are all still there. The title refers to the mysterious radio signal detected in 1977 that some interpreted as a possible extraterrestrial message. At first glance, The Wow! Signal looks like another house-brand exercise in science fiction.

That choice is no accident. Bellamy has long described Muse as an attempt to make sense of emotions he himself did not fully understand. “The most difficult points in your life are when you don’t have any answers and you don’t know what to do or what the future looks like,” he recently told NME, speaking about the origins of The Wow! Signal. In another interview in The Guardian he recalled that Muse started out ”as an emotional expression of unknown anxieties” and that, over time, they have tried to understand what emotions lay beneath all of that. More than a political discourse or a collection of conspiracy theories, Muse was born as an attempt to name an anxiety Bellamy still didn’t know how to explain.

That need to find explanations goes back a long way. Bellamy has said his mother often reminds him that when he was four or five and learning to write, he would throw his pen to the floor and ask again and again: “But why?” He says he has never stopped doing it. “I’ve always needed an explanation for why things happen. I want to decipher the motivations and who benefits from them.”

Perhaps it is that need for answers that explains much of Muse’s imagery. Secret societies, mass surveillance, authoritarian governments and extraterrestrial signals operate less as conspiracy theories than as a way to make sense of a world Bellamy perceives as confusing. Rather than writing about conspiracies, he writes about anxiety using the language of conspiracies.

In fact, one of his most revealing confessions points precisely in that direction. “I tend to go down the route of paranoia anxiety or the impending doom of technology and anxiety about the future of the world and so on,” he acknowledged in a 2020 interview. “I think some of that stuff actually comes from the fact that that’s what the music itself makes me feel when I’m listening to it.” Emotion comes before story. First comes the feeling of urgency, threat or uncertainty; then the conspiracies, the cosmic language and all the images Bellamy uses to shape and understand those emotions.

Bellamy never distances himself from the anxiety he describes. He gives himself over to it completely. The result is hyperbolic, utterly paranoid songs, but never cynical or ironic. Paranoia, in Muse’s songs, is nothing more and nothing less than the truth. Perhaps that is why Muse have never been a particularly cool band.

That reading is not accidental either. Uprising, probably their best-known song, uses the language of social revolution, but the threat it describes is never identified — it remains open to interpretation. That ambiguity allows each listener to project their own obsessions: governments, corporations, the media or any other form of power. More than a political argument, the song sketches the feeling that there are forces too large to fully comprehend.

It is enough, however, to look more closely at their songs to see that they rarely speak about what they seem to describe. Bellamy has explained that The Wow! Signal, an album full of extraterrestrial references, actually springs from his breakup with his children’s mother. “Love revealed our failed rebellion,” Matt sings in Hexagons. The same is true of Supermassive Black Hole: beneath an avalanche of astronomical images there lies, simply, a love song. Even tracks like Plug in Baby or Hysteria, which appear to be about manipulation, control or loss of freedom, arise from far more personal emotions. Bellamy does not ground his feelings; he projects them onto the cosmos. He turns them into planets, alien invasions or black holes. It is the same emotional impulse as any romantic composer’s, only expressed on a cosmic scale.

Perhaps that is part of the source of the rejection Muse still provokes. Their songs deal with love, fear, desire and loss just like many others. The difference is that Bellamy never expresses those emotions in everyday terms: he turns them into science-fiction films. That aesthetic choice, as excessive as it is sincere, has always occupied an awkward place in a rock canon that has tended to value restraint, irony or confessional realism.

Far from correcting that tendency, Muse have turned it into their identity. The grandiosity first glimpsed on Origin of Symmetry has grown with every record. From Black Holes and Revelations to The Resistance, the conceptual Drones or that double-Muse album that is Will of the People, Bellamy has never seemed concerned with appearing excessive. The band has preferred to keep expanding its universe rather than tone down its ambition to win prestige.

That aesthetic clash is no accident either. Muse emerged when rock was moving in the opposite direction. In the early 2000s, while The Strokes or The White Stripes championed authenticity, restraint and unadorned guitars, Bellamy looked to the heightened drama of Queen, Pink Floyd and classical music. While indie aspired to sound like a garage band, Muse dreamed of filling stadiums by writing songs that felt like cinematic superproductions.

The difference was not limited to the music. Bellamy has never fit neatly into rock iconography. He is not a tortured hero, a style icon or a conventional sex symbol. Onstage he has always conveyed the sense of a musician fascinated more by physics, synthesizers and classical music than by the traditional rockstar persona. Even when he delivers one of contemporary rock’s most spectacular falsettos, he seems less intent on seducing the crowd than on pushing a musical idea to its limit.

Unlike much of rock, Muse have never distrusted pop. Their catalog pairs metal-leaning riffs with songs as melodic as Starlight, Madness or Panic Station. For Bellamy, a great melody has always trumped any rock orthodoxy. Perhaps that is why Muse have achieved something rare: appealing simultaneously to fans of hard rock and to pop listeners. Paradoxically, that same ease at moving between both worlds has, for years, fueled suspicion among some critics, for whom sounding too accessible has always been cause for doubt.

It is unlikely that The Wow! Signal will change the minds of those who have spent two decades seeing Muse as an exaggerated band. Nor does Bellamy seem particularly interested in convincing them. By now it is obvious that Muse have never wanted to correct what makes them recognizable. They keep writing small operas for stadiums. They keep elevating emotions to the size of a black hole. And they keep doing it with the same conviction they did 20 years ago.

Maybe that is Muse’s real secret. For years we have argued about whether their songs were about conspiracies, aliens or revolutions, when in reality they have always been about the same things the rest of popular music addresses: fear, desire, love, uncertainty and loss. The difference is that Bellamy has chosen to express those emotions with the language of science fiction, physics and dystopias. Maybe that is why Muse still divides so much. Or maybe simply because rock has not yet reconciled itself with those who dare to feel big.

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