Credit: Danny ClinchLyrically, Muse's new album Drones might be the band's most ambitious, but from a sonic perspective, they wanted to try something a little simpler than the grandiose sound of their last album, 2012's The 2nd Law.
"By our standards, [Drones] is back to basics," drummer Dom Howard tells NME. "Yeah, it's layered and bombastic, but the start of that process was very different to how we normally do it."
"I think on The 2nd Law, producing it ourselves, we spent so much time in the control room that we lost sight of ourselves as a band," he adds. "We wanted to push the boat out on Drones. For that reason, it's very diverse -- it's the sound of us being very experimental and losing our minds a bit."
That experimentation seems to have paid off, as the lead single from Drones, "Dead Inside," has topped Billboard's Alternative Songs and Rock Airplay charts for two straight weeks. The lyrics on "Dead Inside" aren't particularly upbeat, and things get even darker in the title track. Frontman Matt Bellamy describes "Drones," which is the closing song on the album, as a "lament for the victims" of drone warfare.
"It ends on this ghostly chorus of the forgotten," Bellamy says. "They will never see justice, and they have been killed by a robot. There's something inherently tragic about humanity there."
Drones will be released on June 9.
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