Credit: Danny ClinchMuse has always had a flair for the dramatic, but they really upped the bombast on their last few albums. For their new record, Drones, the band decided to try a back-to-the-basics sonic approach.
"Our intention was to go back to how we made music in the early stages of our career," frontman Matt Bellamy tells Rolling Stone. "When we were more like a standard three-piece rock band with guitar, bass and drums."
Bellamy doesn't want to take anything away from Muse's last three albums, of which he's very proud, but he felt the band spent too much time on production.
"We probably spent more time in the control room, fiddling with knobs and synths and computers and drum machines than actually playing together as a band," Bellamy says. "As I look back at the last three albums, each one had progressively less and less songs that we could play live."
After producing their last two albums themselves, Muse wanted to get out of the control room, so they hired producer Robert "Mutt" Lange, best known for working on AC/DC's Back in Black.
"He's a very eccentric person, very laid back," says Bellamy of Lange. "He has the air of a person that has not lived in the constraints of normal society or life for a very long time. You feel like you're in the presence of some sort of guru or spiritual outsider."
Though Muse took a simpler approach to Drones, that approach won't apply to their famously extravagant live show.
"It's going to be even more theatrical than probably any show we've done in North America," Bellamy says of the band's upcoming tour, which they are currently in the midst of booking. "I don't want to promise too much, but we want to incorporate drones into the show. I don't know what health and safety will allow us to do though."
Drones will be released on June 9.
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