Let’s be honest: at this point, you’re either a Muse fan or you’re not. Matt Bellamy and his bandmates make the kind of music that is as divisive as someone’s political leanings: if you are predisposed to ridiculously overblown operatic space rock, you will happily die on that hill. If you’re not, the Devon trio are basically Spinal Tap without the in-jokes.
Alienating though they may be in some quarters, Muse have managed to establish themselves as one of the biggest rock bands on the planet, selling 20 million records since their 1994 inception. Their ninth studio album, written as a reaction to their label’s request for a greatest hits compilation — this is a “greatest hits of new songs”, according to Bellamy — is another collection of bombastic rock songs. Inspired by “a pandemic, new wars in Europe, massive protests and riots, an attempted insurrection, Western democracy wavering, rising authoritarianism, wildfires and natural disasters and the destabilisation of the global order” (all the fun, lighthearted stuff, in other words), it’s almost admirable how the trio manage to wrest a pompous, mainstream rock record from such weighty topics.
As with all Muse albums, however, you’ll enjoy Will of the People much more if you leave your preconceptions at the door and just go with the flow. Not all albums should require a suspension of disbelief, but songs such as You Make Me Feel Like It’s Halloween (an intersection between Thriller, The Addams Family theme and Iron Maiden) tread such a thin line between novelty and bluster that it’s necessary. Liberation is so brazenly indebted to Queen that you have to shrug and laugh; the title track takes its cue from shoulder-shimmying 1970s glam rock; Compliance injects darts of ABBA-esque synths into a puffed-up rock song. On the other hand, songs such as Ghosts (How Can I Move On), with its intricate piano riff and maudlin lyrics (”I am lost in a void with your ghost and our memories”) are almost too terrible to overlook. Closing track We Are F***ing F***ed (“Hole up! Stockpile! Board up!”) veers worryingly close to that most unforgivable of musical sins: the millionaire rock star preaching to the proles about how hopeless our collective situation is.
If you’re after big, beefy rock songs with jagged guitars and pummeled drums, you’ll find them here. If you’re looking for tunes with tenderness, rousing calls-to-arms or ridiculously overdone riffs set against orchestral backdrops, you’ll find them here, too. Muse have thrown everything at the wall and framed it as a revolutionary response to a crumbling world — but really, this is just another collection of extravagant, preposterous and, all right: perhaps even occasionally enjoyable rock songs.
