Muse have shared another taster of upcoming album ‘The Wow! Signal’ with the old-school space rocker ‘Cryogen’. Check it out below.
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Following on from last year’s ‘Unravelling‘ and recent lead single ‘Be With You’ that launched the album, the Devonshire stadium trio’s latest cut from their incoming 10th LP has now been officially released after being given its live debut at their intimate Brixton Academy gig in London earlier this month.
Starting with a wailing guitar intro that feels like a cousin to the iconic ‘Plug In Baby’ riff, ‘Cryogen’ offers a nod or to Muse’s past with echoes of the band’s gothic space rock of seminal 2001 album ‘Origin Of Symmetry‘ and 2006’s widescreen stadium anthemics of ‘Black Holes & Revelations‘, complete a thunderous breakdown and a slick sense of completion courtesy of the production from live member Dan Lancaster (Bring Me The Horizon, Blink-182). Additional production comes from Aleks von Korff.
Lyrically, frontman Matt Bellamy projects his heartache onto an apocalyptic canvas: “Winter’s end, she’s Europa, I’m a cracked interloper / Icicles pierce my heart so cruel and quiet / Loneliness, she left me trembling in a polar desert / Wilderness, I’m breaking…Cryogen, I can never cry again / Cryogen, I’m freezing over.”
Per a press release, ‘The Wow! Signal’ takes its title from one of the most compelling interstellar mysteries of the last century – “a powerful 72-second radio burst detected in 1977 originating from the constellation Sagittarius with a bandwidth and intensity that suggested a possible extraterrestrial source”.
“The astronomer who discovered the anomaly famously circled the now-iconic sequence ‘6EQUJ5’ and wrote ‘WOW!’ on the printout beside it – giving the signal its name and cementing its place in scientific and pop-culture lore,” it added
The record is said to explore “a mix of cosmic mystery, existential hope, and the exhilarating possibility of contact with something far greater than ourselves”.
Muse embarked on a European tour last year, including a headline set at Madrid’s Mad Cool Festival, where the band stepped in for Kings Of Leon.
NME described the show as an “era-spanning, revolutionary space-tacular” with “Matt Bellamy and co easing into their new cycle with riffs and revolution”.
‘The Wow! Signal’ will arrive on June 26. Muse have also announced a 2026 North American arena tour with Bloc Party, The Temper Trap and Portugal. The Man. UK and European dates are expected to be announced shortly, after Bellamy teased at their recent London gig that the band would “be back in November“.