For the cover art, they’ve enlisted Stranger Things poster artist Kyle Lambert for a sci-fi photo-montage painting, and coupled with the dark-wave synth chug of album opener “Algorithm,” one wonders if Matt Bellamy realizes he’s literally last in line for this year’s retrofuturism trend.Īs for the music, the band has returned to producer Rich Costey-that’s his real name -who last worked with them on their most remembered albums, Absolution and Black Holes and Revelations. Muse’s eighth studio album, Simulation Theory, is certainly not their best-but it still serves the same Cinnabon -esque function as every Muse album, which is tickling your brainstem with sensory pleasure until you’ve got to stop, disgusted by your own indulgence. This is what the Master Chief from Halo ’s band would sound like. All that sonic hellfire coming from just the three of them.
#MUSE SIMULATION THEORY TV#
I know this because I have been a thirteen-year-old boy glued to my suburban home’s TV set, witnessing Chris Wolstenholme thumbing his bass with the synth-fuzz set to deadly voltage, Dominic Howard barreling down on his transparent toms as neon lasers shot through them, and Matt Bellamy in a lab coat scraping the Kaoss Pad he mounted straight into his guitar as a futurist whammy bar, still holding the same note of falsetto from the last chorus.
But they’re also a band that has fashioned the sheer abandonment of taste into a tool for unadulterated awesomeness.
It doesn’t take a connoisseur to have noticed, by now, that Muse has cringe-worthy taste.