Teignmouth, UK · alt-rock · arena-rock

Muse

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Paranoid space-opera rock at maximum scale — riffs, falsetto and conspiracy concept albums built for the biggest possible stage.

Before settling on the name Muse, Matt Bellamy, Chris Wolstenholme and Dominic Howard played together in Teignmouth under the names Gothic Plague and then Rocket Baby Dolls, with a goth-glam look and equipment partly funded by a Prince's Trust grant. Winning a local battle of the bands in 1994 by smashing their gear on stage, the trio quit their jobs and left Teignmouth as Muse.

The band's early records, Showbiz and Origin of Symmetry, combined heavy riffing with classical piano figures and Bellamy's high falsetto, drawing frequent comparisons to Radiohead that the band steadily outgrew.

Absolution, released in 2003, added strings to songs such as "Butterflies and Hurricanes" and opened a run of seven consecutive UK number-one albums. Black Holes and Revelations followed in 2006, folding in electronic and pop elements on singles like "Supermassive Black Hole" and widening the band's audience outside Britain.

The Resistance and The 2nd Law turned toward themes of government overreach and civil uprising, cementing Muse's stadium status, while 2015's Drones, a concept album about drone warfare, topped the Billboard 200 in the US. Simulation Theory in 2018 leaned on synthesisers and science-fiction imagery drawn from the simulation hypothesis.

The band has won two Grammy Awards, two Brit Awards, five MTV Europe Music Awards and an Ivor Novello Award for International Achievement, and has sold more than 30 million albums worldwide.

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