Is anyone genuinely excited for a new Muse album anymore? The band, more than twenty years into their career, are still headlining festivals and selling out arenas, so I guess the answer is affirmative. Matt Bellamy and Co., to their credit, have a talent for mixing influences, often more critically acclaimed than them, into something surprisingly marketable. And despite how that sentence might come across, I mean that in the best way. Through their discography, the alt rock/prog rock/space rock band have earned comparisons to Queen in their grandeur, Radiohead in their “experimentation”, Depeche Mode in their penchant for the occasional foot-stomp synth incorporation… the list goes on.

Yet they were always able to do it in a way that’s notably easy to get into, by way of catchy riffs and, particularly with their singles, fairly simplistic and Coldplay-like song structures. There’s a particular art to that kind of thing. But in recent years it’s seemed that Muse have become more of a meme than a genuine modern rock band that people, the critical community in particular, take seriously. A lot of it has to do with the band’s particular formula becoming increasingly more predictable with the unforgiving passage of time, to the extent that even when they try to do something new, they tend to do it in a way that’s so expected, so Muse-esque, that you can’t help but roll your eyes, like we all did last time out with 2015’s Drones. Here’s a brief list of things, for the uninitiated, of what one might expect from a new Muse release in 2018:

Distortion. Matt Bellamy’s increasingly vague “us vs. them” narratives that try to pass themselves off as genuine social commentary. The idea that a band, who made their career on arena rock, incorporating synthesizers is somehow rebellious and interesting, even in 2018, even after five albums of non-modest synth usage already. More distortion. “I found a crusty Beethoven vinyl in my attic and have read a sci-fi book exactly once” string sections. Bellamy trying to emulate Thom Yorke’s vocal inflections to sing about the evil government, assumedly ruled by Dr Robotnik and his league of evil minions, who are trying to murder all the polar bears. Even more shameless distortion. Beats to stomp along to. Stomp hard. Stomp like you’re trying to break free from the machine that is this capitalist society we’re forced to live in, the one that lets Muse make a living off of tour shows so extravagant you could feed a refugee camp for a month from the budget.

READ MORE: Muse // ‘Absolution’ at 10 years old

In all honesty, I’m really not the one to judge any kind of pretention or grandiose ambitions. I will defend someone’s right to write an opera-like, five-part octet, full of Jesus metaphors and Shakespeare references, about how an iPhone app is fucking all of us over, if they want to do so. Ambition and the wish to do something outside of the bare minimum of what’s expected of you shouldn’t have immediate negative connotations. I was one of the people who genuinely enjoyed it when Muse released a three-part ‘Exogenesis’ symphony on The Resistance, because I thought it was worthy of praise that a rock band would even try and do that at any point past the late ‘80s, when unabashed sincerity seemingly died and was replaced by its evil twin of constant irony, self-awareness, and apathy. I was even kind of still there for it when they incorporated a full-blown choir of dramatized Gregorian chants on ‘Survival’. Because why not? Who else, other than Muse, has the sheer disregard for coming across as ridiculous to do that. And yet, I shuddered at the announcement of Simulation Theory.

Before even listening to the first single, one can’t help but gawk at the aesthetic catastrophe that is the album’s front cover. You can understand that it’s inspired by ‘80s sci-fi movie posters. That it’s self-aware of the Tron/Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift/Blade Runner/Vaporwave pastiche it’s presenting. And it still doesn’t make it any less horrific to look at. Like a Frankenstein’s monster of cultural theft that shouldn’t exist, and yet it’s right there, before your eyes, and no amount of the power of Christ can compel it away.

Honestly, it makes you immediately question the seriousness of Simulation Theory as a whole. Surely, Bellamy couldn’t have looked at the pout-face making, neon-shade wearing version of himself on the cover next to the neon-glow Japanese writing and the Lamborghini and said “Yeah. This is gonna change the world.” And yet it is what it is. An album so weirdly wrapped up in its own self-importance and camp that it’s genuinely impossible to tell if this was meant to be a joke or not. And even more difficult to tell if I’m supposed to review it from the perspective of Muse bravely taking a shit on everyone’s expectations and any sense of artistic progress, or if I’m meant to actually be constructing any valid and well-argued opinions on this.

So anyway, here are the genuine notes I made on my first listen-through of the album. Because if Muse can throw something together so haphazardly, why can’t I?

‘Algorithm’ – Hello? Early Nine Inch Nails? Is that you? Didn’t take long for those Depeche Mode-inspired synthesizers to come in. Or the one-two beat. You can hear the packed arena of the beat-down rock fans clapping along to this already. Oooh, string section, didn’t see that coming. Nice one, Bellamy. Hope you paid the studio musicians what they deserve. Oh dear lord the first line is “Burn like a slave / Churn like a cog”. It’s almost calming to know that in this constantly evolving and changing at a pace we can’t even keep up with society, the one constant is that Bellamy’s surface-level insights into the modern human condition will always stay the same.

‘The Dark Side’ – This is just the last song again but with an added 20 bpms. “Set me free” – goes Bellamy to the one-two beat pattern. And “Quack” goes the duck. That’s right, The Stomp will set you free. The Stomp will free us all. All hail The Stomp.

‘Pressure’ – Umm… Is that an actual distorted brass section? The memes generate themselves. Please tell me Michael Bublé has a feature on this track singing about the superficiality of Hollywood? Oh wait, no, there’s a distorted guitar instead. Oh well. One can dream.

‘Propoganda’ – …he rhymes “floozy” with “woozy” and I have no words for that. Honestly, this sounds like a Lonely Island parody of Muse, there’s no way to even ironically indulge in this.

‘Break It To Me’ – And this one sounds like a Jason Derulo cover, but with an alternate universe in which the soundtrack for ‘The X-Files’ was a heavy rock one and had this as its end theme twist to it. As I’m writing this, I realise that sounds way better than what it actually is. Honestly though if no one makes a mash up of this and ‘Talk Dirty To Me’ what was the internet even invented for. The drum machine/synthesizer (was Dominic Howard even present for the recording of this album?) having a little, in-beat, freak-out towards the end and the guitar bends being in perceptible dissonance is what I think passed for experimentation to tick that particular checkbox in the studio.

‘Something Human’ – There is no way anyone wrote this song in genuine seriousness. It’s a Mumford & Sons/Coldplay rip-off. Ironically, considering the title, I can’t even perceive anything other than a Spotify algorithm writing this song.

‘Thought Contagion’ – I’m getting tired. What even is the point? Is any of this real? Maybe making me feel like I’m in a drug-induced fever dream from all the coke I bought with all the Bitcoins I own is the point, and Simulation Theory is actually amazing. It succeeds in its goals in flying, eye-grating, depressingly derivative, neon colours. What if, by even thinking about it, I missed the point, and our shade-wearing, pout-face making hero is there laughing at me from behind his mixing desk that’s worth more than my university degree?

‘Get Up And Fight’ – Insulting. There’s a band that’s like a “punk” version of one direction, i.e., the aesthetic and the fashion marketed at tweens on Tumblr, without any of the actual political statements associated with the movement, otherwise the parents of the tweens might complain. Or maybe I’m making all of this up at this point, who knows. Either way, the chorus of this song sounds exactly like what that band would write. Thanks, I hate it.

‘Blockades’ – I’m sad.

‘Dig Down’ – At this point, I’m certain they ran out of new material for the album and used a B-side from The 2^nd Law. Fight me.

‘The Void’ – This was not worth it.

Oh God, there are even “Alternate Reality” versions of a few songs on the “Super Deluxe” edition. Please, give me the strength to pull through this. I just realised that there’s a Marching Band version of ‘Pressure’ on the album and my Michael Bublé comment just became way more poignant. Is ‘Glee’ still running? Can they cover this?

There are times in your life when you have thoughts that seem to lead up to a conclusion, yet there’s no actual profound conclusion to be made. What is there to say about Simulation Theory, an album that doesn’t seem to lend itself to the assumption that anything about it is meant to be taken seriously? Ha ha, good joke, Muse. That sure made me less sad about the 21^st century. I would hope that this album is actually part of a simulated reality which was built for me to practice being snarky in writing form, but it’s real, and out there, and people spent time and energy on it. Some poor graduate students working in PR probably genuinely had to market this and talk about it. Someone had to film the music videos for this. Someone had to coordinate press-releases for this. I hope they made up fake names for the credits, took the money, and moved to Shanghai. (2/10) (Ellie Wolf)

Listen to Simulation Theory by Muse here via Spotify – if you dare – and tell us what you think below!