Muse’s Matt Bellamy has spoken to NME about overcoming “personal struggles” to rediscover his need for music on new album ‘The Wow!’ Signal’.
The Teignmouth space rock trio release their 10th LP today (Friday June 26), with NME hailing it as “undoubtedly their most consistent and satisfying album since 2006’s ‘Black Holes & Revelations’ – doubling up as either a knowing gift to the fans or at least a response to any concerns that Muse had long disappeared too far up their own supermassive blackholes.”
Named after a powerful and mysterious signal received in 1976 and believed to be from aliens, the album deals heavily in Bellamy’s desire to fill the void of the “unknown”, particularly in the wake of his split from model, actress and mother of two of his children, Elle Evans.
The frontman met NME outside a café in London’s opulent Primrose Hill, near where the band were deep in rehearsals for their upcoming run of North American shows. “I’m good, just getting ready for the tour,” he told NME upon arrival. “I’ve just been to the gym. I’m feeling good. I love the album, and I’m looking forward to playing it live.”
While fans in the UK and Europe might be hoping for the tour to give a glimpse of their winter arena gigs, Bellamy shared that the US dates would be more pared back to fit in the amphitheatres they’ve booked.
“It’s the only viable summer tour in America that’s outdoors unless you’re at stadium level, which we’re not in the US,” he admitted of their more modest Stateside following, compared to the rest of the world. “It’s in between arena and stadium size, but the issue is you can’t do the craziest production. It’ll be a similar production to what we used last summer, but with a few step-ups and a few customisations for this show. But when we come back to the UK in November, that’ll be a brand new really cool production.”
Muse live at Brixton Academy, 2026. (Photo by Joseph Okpako/WireImage)With the band famed for their blockbuster live productions, we had to ask if there’s anything he could tease about plans for the arena show.
“Erm, we’re trying to build a spaceship – as you do! The quote came in and it’s more expensive than some of these houses, and that’s saying something around here,” Bellamy replied, gesturing down the street of multi-million-pound Victorian townhouses. “We’re trying to work with that, build a spaceship, do some new stuff with lasers that’s never been done before, and yeah, it will be a classic. It’s going to be more in the space, sci-fi realm, which I think is cool for us.”
Does said spaceship fly?
“We’re trying to make it fly,” the frontman told us. “I don’t think it will. That’s the thing that costs more than a house, but it will be something cool, I promise.”
Despite these extraterrestrial ambitions, Muse’s new album is their most human in decades, with Bellamy tackling his internal turmoil after a tough period of “personal struggles”.
“I would say that for the last few albums, I was thinking about external things, like politics, the world, the future, even sci-fi and fictional things, you know, but not my own internal stuff,” he shared. While looking to the sky for answers, this time Bellamy’s feet were firmly on planet Earth.
Check out the rest of our interview below, where the frontman told NME about rediscovering his own muse, dealing with hard times, his connection to the fans, taking advice from Coldplay’s Chris Martin and The Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger, and what the future holds.
NME: Hello Matt. Now 10 albums into your career, what does music and the vehicle of this band do for you at this stage?
Matt Bellamy: “That’s the thing with this album. I went through difficult personal life things this past year, so making this album reminded me of making music when I was a kid in my teenage years, back when music was everything. ‘I can’t live without music’ – that feeling came back to me on this album. Music became a lifeline again, a catharsis, the thing that I held on to, to hold on to my identity.
“In those early years, you didn’t have any success, you didn’t have any guaranteed tours happening or anything. It was just, ‘This is who I am, this is who I want to be, this is what I need to do to express myself…’ Then you go through that success period. For the last 10 to 15 years, my life has generally been very good. Nice family, kids, blah, blah, blah. I’ve been through a few minor difficulties here and there, but generally speaking, music didn’t always become what I had to do; it was just what I chose to do. This has been an important album for me, both emotionally speaking with what it’s about, but it also reminded me again of why I got into music. It’s a little bit of a surprising late-stage renaissance.”
Were you jumping into music to fill a void from something suddenly missing?
“It’s trying to understand the unknown. 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. You feel lost, alone, and that you don’t know what’s happening. It’s confusion and searching for answers inside yourself. That’s really the best place for an artist to be. When you have a period where you feel like you’re in control of your life and your career, where everything’s going well, that’s a really hard place to write from. I didn’t want that to be true, but I’ve just proven it to myself because I do think it’s the best album we’ve done in a long time. I’m like, ‘Damn, I’m going to have to live a life of turmoil to make good music! How annoying!’”
And that’s been missing from your recent albums?
“It was David Bowie who spoke about the need to create characters. There are some albums I’ve done where it is very good, like ‘Drones’ or ‘The Resistance’, where there’s a little bit of delving into fictional – being inspired by 1984, thinking about sci-fi stories or what I would do if I was going through military training. I don’t think you can beat authentic, real-life experience.”
There are sonic references or echoes of earlier Muse on this album. Were you mining those sounds because you were feeling similar feelings?
“It may be more that, yes. It didn’t occur to me at all that something like ‘Hexagons’ or ‘The Dark Forest’ sounded like early Muse. I didn’t see that, but when we put ‘Hexagons’ out, the fan base was like, ‘This is Muse!’ I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ I can see it in ‘Cryogen’. That was me forcing myself to do a song on just guitar, bass and drums, just sticking to a three-piece. With what the song’s about, I wanted it to be raw, histrionic, emotional, a little bit out of control. That was maybe more of a slightly conscious lean into early Muse, but with the rest of the album, I’m not quite so sure.”
Is there a concept to this record beyond ‘The Wow! Signal’ and responding to that call being received from the unknown?
“As humanity, what do we do as humans and individuals when we don’t know the answers to anything? We search for the answers. Where do we search? We look at the stars, we invent religions, we imagine aliens. It’s hard to put a concept on that. For an album to have a concept, you have to have control. You create a beginning, a middle, and an end. This album is accidentally out of control. I haven’t really pieced it together yet.
“If there is a theme, it’s about searching for a higher power and not knowing what that is: whether alien intelligence, God, [or] AI becoming God. Then obviously, a personal relationship breakdown is clearly a theme of the album. How do those two things go together? I don’t know. When people go through difficult periods, the solution isn’t searching for love. People go through loss, people go through grieving and breakups where the immediate solution isn’t to find someone to love. It’s to find out what it’s all about.”
That question of ‘What am I without X, Y or Z’?
“Yes. It sounds cheesy and teenage angst-y, but it’s existential confusion. That’s really what’s going on.”
It’s not necessarily teenage angst if the question becomes much heavier later in life…
“A midlife crisis, maybe? When you’re young, you have this whole life in front of you to make changes, to make repairs. When you get older, you sometimes start to have that feeling. I say it on ‘Shimmering Scars’: ‘I can’t start again’. I’m too old now, and I’ve lost a little bit of that ability to just start again and meet someone new. I’ve done that cycle too many times now, and I’m at a different level of existential cynicism.”
With this being your most personal record in so long, how do you feel about putting so much of yourself out there, or at least putting this side of yourself out there?
“I’ve been in an unusual phase where, in reality, perceiving reactions from the fans is just kind of like noise. I haven’t thought about that really until I started doing interviews, then I was like, ‘Oh my God, how am I going to talk about this?’
“I’ll be honest with you and say that there are things I don’t want to talk about because what actually went down isn’t what people might think. It was something very unusual to do with health, mental health, having to be a single parent with no co-parent for a lengthy period, having to cancel a tour to be there for my children, things like that. It was a very unusual, unpredictable period, and I thought to myself, ‘How am I really going to talk about this in interviews because it’s going to be really uncomfortable?’
“That’s really the cause of the album. I would like for people to be able to infer some of the things that went down from the album itself.”
And now you have to play these songs live…
“When I started rehearsing these songs and thinking about the live show, I’m so caught up in what it makes me feel that I’m so in it and not really able to worry or think about what anyone else thinks. That’s a very interesting feeling. That might be a new thing. In the early years, it was a combination of both. I had to express myself, but I did have the fear of what people thought because my ability to make a living depended on it.
“When I was 19, 20, 21, I didn’t know what my future was then, you know? Caring about what the press said or what the fans thought did matter. Now it doesn’t. It’s a personal thing. When I play these songs, I’ll be feeling them and feeling what they meant to me. I don’t have the mental capacity to process what other people think about them.”
How do you feel about doing that in a stadium?
“I remember the first few years of Muse touring, and I wasn’t really looking at the crowd or feeling what they were feeling; that came as we got bigger. It might be that when I play some of these new songs for the first time and get a positive reaction, that in itself might be an unbelievable feeling of connection with strangers. That might be the thing that is part of my journey. Instead of finding religion or God, any kind of higher power or aliens, I found this fan base. When I have these crazy ideas or expressions and they respond to it, that is maybe the answer for me. I’ve never allowed myself to think that way because for decades, you think, ‘OK, this is temporary, you can’t connect to your audience, you can’t rely on that your audience will always be there’. That can be the demise of people that have huge success in the entertainment industry.
“When your audience goes away, which it always does in older age, people crumble. That’s when they turn to drug addiction or lose their mind. For the first time ever, I’m letting myself believe that they’re going to be there for me. I need them.”
Muse, 2026. Credit: Tim SaccentiThat’s interesting, as when you guys first emerged, you didn’t seem to care about the outside world – it seemed like you were separate from trends and seeing how much you could get away with…
“There were three things going on back then: the end of Britpop, nu-metal in America, and then the new exciting thing was The Strokes, The White Stripes, that retro rock ‘n’ roll thing. We didn’t fit in with any of those things – and that, in hindsight, was a blessing really. The fact that we somehow found an audience without being part of a trend is amazing, and I think that’s why we’re still here. We are the definition of alternative, and I’m very, very happy about that. We’ve never been in fashion enough that when the limelight moves away from you, you’re just finished.
“I was at Coachella the other week and I bumped into Jack White and Albert [Hammond Jr] from The Strokes. I was just backstage chatting to them and I went, ‘Fuck, we’re still here!’ We were like, ‘We’re the guitarists from the 2000s! We did it!’ It was so cool. Maybe there was a bit of a scene back then, but it was defined by being a little bit alternative to the mainstream. I’m very glad we didn’t fit in.”
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There’s also a modern sheen to this album. How much of that is courtesy of Bring Me The Horizon producer and your live keys man, Dan Lancaster?
“This is the first time we’ve really had a proper producer for the whole album. Eight songs were produced by Dan and two by Aleks Von Korff, who’s an engineer that we’ve worked with for a long time. It was definitely a bit of an adjustment for us to just let go of the reins a little bit in terms of the sound, the mixing and the production side of things, but we do feel like we shouldn’t be self-producing any more!
“We’re such control freaks around everything we do, so the hardest battle of the whole process was just sitting back and going, ‘Just let Dan mix this bit, trust that’s going to be good’. You let him go off on one; it sounds fresh, and it sounds like Muse, but it’s a more up-to-date sound. If you put it up against ‘Origin Of Symmetry’ [2001], it still has the rawness of the performance but it does sound a lot bigger, a lot more present and in your face. He did a great job. That’s potentially the beginning of a longer-term relationship because he’s kind of almost in the band.”
Beyond the sound, how did Lancaster push you?
“He just pushed us in a way that we’ve not been pushed. That was a little bit of an awkward hump to get over because he’s younger than us. The last time we got told what to do, it was by people who were old enough to be our dads! It was a little bit of an ego hump to get over for all three band members. What Dan was doing more than anything was saying things like, ‘Make that guitar part better’. He wasn’t necessarily coming up with parts, but just saying, ‘Do a better thing’. ‘Fucking sing that better’. I was like, ‘Easy mate! You work for me!’
“Sometimes a little bit of young blood and enthusiasm in the camp helps. It took a minute to go, ‘Yeah, he’s right, isn’t he?’ He really helped push us past the lazy point of middle age and get back into pushing ourselves into the uncomfortable zone.”
This is the first time you’ve had a guest vocalist on a Muse album with Ellie Goulding jumping on ‘Hush’…
“Again, I’ll give a little credit to Dan on this one because I’ve never done co-writing sessions or camps. That’s very much the pop world. I’m very good friends with Chris Martin, and he’s been doing that for a long time. Their band was elevated into that pop world, and he’s worked with amazing writers, collaborators and producers. Chris actually got me a Christmas present one year, and it was a book called The Collaborative Way. It was his way of saying, ‘You’re an auto dictator, you need to learn to collaborate’. I read the book and I was like, ‘Fuck, of course he’s right’. I only managed to pull it off on one song on this album. Dan put together a little writing team, so ‘Hush’ is the first time we’ve done a collaborative co-write.
“We did it, the song came together, and by absolutely sheer coincidence, Ellie Goulding was working next door with Marshmello. I’ve bumped into Ellie a bunch of times over the years and we’ve talked about doing something. She just popped her head in at about 11pm. She asked to listen, we had zero planning on this, and someone asked her to sing on it. We just turned it into a duet at that point. She sang it in a couple of takes and an hour-and-a-half later, we had the song.”
And it’s heavier than fans might have been expecting…
“I know, it’s quite fun to have Ellie Goulding singing over an eight-string metal guitar.”
Now that you’ve been through this profound musical rediscovery, how do you feel about the future with Muse? Will you be doing this until you keel over and die like The Rolling Stones?
“It’s funny you say that, because I met Mick Jagger at a party in LA about a year ago. I was chatting to him briefly, and I only talked to him about one thing. I asked him what his fitness regime was and at what age he started. He told me he started in his 40s, where however long the tour was, he’d work out for that length beforehand. It started out like that, then he said by the time he got to his 50s, he just had to work out all the time, 365 days a year, or he couldn’t do any touring.
“I don’t know, we’ll see. What it comes down to is whether you are able to stay fit. It’s a boring answer, but 60s? I don’t know if I’ll still be up there in my 60s. I think we’ve got another good 10 years left in us.”
If you were to reply to ‘The Wow! Signal’ to send something back to the aliens, what would you say?
“‘We come in peace’. What else can you say? That’s essential. We don’t know what’s out there. It’s naive to presume that all life that’s not on this planet is good; we are certainly not. Even though the universe is full of beauty and creation, it’s also full of misery and destruction. It’s very possible that another lifeform out there could want to destroy us or take the planet for whatever reason. I think we have to be careful. So ‘we come in peace’ would be the prime message.”
‘The Wow! Signal’ by Muse is out now. Muse kick off their North American tour on Thursday July 2 before UK and European dates begin in November. Visit here for tickets and more information.
The post Matt Bellamy on rediscovering his own muse: “I can’t live without music – that feeling came back to me on this album” appeared first on NME.