Muse have long toyed with technology and sci-fi in their music, but now they’re doing it in real life, too. The alt-rock band just announced their new album, The Wow! Signal, by launching a special tablet over 20 miles into the atmosphere, in partnership with Sent Into Space. While that screen was above the earth, Muse premiered the music video for their new single, “Be With You,” which you can watch below.
The Wow! Signal is out June 26 via Warner. The 10-song LP, which also includes the previously released single “Unravelling,” gets its name from a famous interstellar mystery that actually happened. In 1977, a powerful 72-second radio burst was detected originating from the Sagittarius constellation with a bandwidth and intensity that suggested a possible extraterrestrial source. After discovering it, the astronomer circled the now-famous sequence “6EQUJ5” and scribbled “Wow!” beside it. The rest, as they say, is scientific pop-culture history.
Expanding on that ambiance, a press release for The Wow! Signal describes the album as being “a mix of cosmic mystery, existential hope, and the exhilarating possibility of contact with something far greater than ourselves.” It helps that one of the songs is titled “Cryogen.” Either way, Muse are going big for their tenth album and follow-up to Will of the People, which came out in 2022.
Read Pitchfork’s Sunday Review of Muse’s classic Origin of Symmetry.
The Wow! Signal:
01 The Dark Forest
02 Nightshift Superstar
03 Shimmering Scars
04 Cryogen
05 Be With You
06 Hexagons
07 The Sickness in You & I
08 Unravelling
09 Hush
10 Space Debris
