Muse Reach for the Cosmos on The Wow! Signal
Muse have never been a band afraid of going big, and The Wow! Signal, their tenth studio album, released June 26 on Warner Records and Helium-3, takes its name from a narrowband radio signal detected in 1977 that some still think came from another civilization. That is an extremely Muse place to plant a flag. The reviews are generally warm, with a 76 on Metacritic and strong marks from the Guardian, NME and Kerrang!, the kind of consensus the band has not always enjoyed in its more bombastic phases.
The album arrives at an interesting moment for the genre. Rock spent a decade being declared dead, and then in 2025 Ghost and Sleep Token both topped the Billboard 200 within two weeks of each other, with Sleep Token setting a streaming record for a hard rock album. Industry trackers had rock among the fastest-growing genres in the United States, outpacing Latin and country. Muse are veterans rather than insurgents in that story, but a major new album from one of arena rock's biggest live acts is a useful data point: the audience that fills stadiums for guitars did not disappear, it just stopped showing up on the singles chart for a while.
Whether The Wow! Signal converts the curious or just satisfies the faithful is the open question. Muse at their best fuse paranoia, falsetto and a wall of synthesized noise into something genuinely strange for a band this size. At their worst they tip into self-parody. A space-signal concept album could go either way, and the early reviews suggest this one lands closer to the good Muse than the silly one. For a band ten albums deep, that is a real achievement.
