Muse's 'The Wow! Signal' Is Out, and the Five Songs They Held Back Are the Best Part

Muse's tenth album is out. The Wow! Signal hit streaming at midnight ET on June 26 through Warner and the band's own Helium-3 label. Ten tracks, about 45 minutes, the end of a rollout that started back in the summer of 2025.

Here is what the year-long campaign got backwards. Muse led with the safe songs. "Unravelling" dropped June 20, 2025, then "Be With You" in March, "Cryogen" in April, "Nightshift Superstar" right before the record, and "Hush" alongside it. Five of the ten public by release day, and the poppier ones in that batch are the weakest case for the album. The reason to care lives in the five tracks they held back. Now that critics have the full sequence, those are the ones pulling the rave.

What the record is

The title comes from the Wow! signal, the 72-second narrowband radio burst Ohio State's Big Ear telescope caught out of Sagittarius in August 1977. It played once and never again. Astronomer Jerry Ehman circled the readout and wrote "Wow!" in the margin, and nobody has explained it in the decades since. Matt Bellamy has been writing about deep space and who runs things down here since Origin of Symmetry in 2001, so the concept sits in his lane.

Under the sci-fi is a breakup. Bellamy wrote the album after splitting from Elle Evans, and per NME's Andrew Trendell that heartache pushed him back toward the band's earlier sound. They tracked it at Abbey Road in London, The Red Room in Santa Monica, and the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles. Dan Lancaster, the band's live keys player and the producer who sharpened Bring Me the Horizon's recent run, takes co-writing and co-production credits across the record. It is the first time a Muse studio album has carried an outside co-writing credit.

The five they held back

A note before the praise: nobody at BCN has the finished record in hand yet. The descriptions below come from critics who heard advance copies, named as I go, plus the singles anyone can stream this morning.

Opener "The Dark Forest" is the one reviewers keep reaching for comparisons to pin down. NME hears a sequel to "Knights of Cydonia." Kerrang's Nick Ruskell calls it a retro-futuristic Bond theme with an orchestral chant close to Ghost's "Year Zero." The AU Review's Jennifer Lavis-Quinlin catches a Latin choir buried in it, "sanctus dominus deus," over a Morricone gallop. The shared read is scale, and a band that sounds like it is enjoying the size.

"Shimmering Scars" is the ballad nearly everyone singles out. Lavis-Quinlin says it made her cry on every listen: a delicate piano line, pipe organ, ethereal harmonies, Bellamy at his most wounded. Kerrang files it next to the Bring Me the Horizon world Lancaster came out of.

"Hexagons" is the existential epic, the kind NME lines up with "Citizen Erased" and "Butterflies and Hurricanes." Kerrang clocks the intro as a blur of Van Halen-style fret-hammering before it opens out. Dominic Howard's drums carry the back half.

"The Sickness in You & I" keeps turning up as the favorite. The AU Review flat out calls it the best thing here, a pulse that is danceable and menacing at once until metal shredding and double-kick drums tear through the middle. Kerrang hears the big swinging riff that powered "Victorious" off The Resistance.

"Space Debris" closes the album as a space-rock waltz about emotional wreckage, an ode to a broken relationship that ends the record intimate and then soaring.

The singles, ranked honestly

The four pre-release tracks plus the Goulding feature are known quantities, so here is where they actually land.

"Cryogen" is the best of the advance batch. Kerrang describes it as Plug In Baby's riff knowingly played backwards with a grin, which is about right.

"Unravelling" was the first sign old Muse had climbed out of the hole, meaty bass and guitar and the kind of drums Black Holes ran on.

"Hush," the Ellie Goulding collaboration co-written by Hurts' Theo Hutchcraft, is not the EDM ballad the credits suggest. It plays closer to menacing electro-rock, and the back-and-forth between Goulding and Bellamy is the hook.

"Nightshift Superstar" is Chris Wolstenholme's funk-bass disco workout. NME tags it a near-miss, Daft-Punk-gone-human, while Kerrang hears full sci-fi disco and means it as a compliment. Pick a side.

"Be With You" runs pipe organ into a techno turn. It is NME's other named miss, a little sugary, and it is telling that both of the album's weak spots were singles.

The verdict

The numbers are lining up. NME 4/5, Kerrang 4/5, the AU Review five out of five, with Ruskell summing it as "delightfully overblown when it wants to be" and "never stupid." The pitch was a return to roots after the harder-to-love Simulation Theory and Will of the People, and for once the comeback narrative is matching the songs rather than standing in for them. The catch the rollout built in still holds: the singles were the known part, and the album works because the hidden half is stronger than the half they used to sell it.

Muse take The Wow! Signal across North America in July, with Bloc Party, Portugal. The Man, and The Temper Trap opening.