Muse’s third album was released in the midst of internal and external turmoil, and it shows. The conspiracy theory-incubating horrors of 9/11 coincided with the band being dumped by US label Maverick. The album that emerged, Absolution, swung between liberation, paranoia and tinfoil-hatted delirium.
Where its predecessor, Origin Of Symmetry, had ramped up the ambition and guitar heroics in the wake of whey-faced debut album Showbiz, Absolution strapped everything to a rocket and blasted it all off into space. Yet epic tunes such as Stockholm Syndrome, the dizzying Hysteria and the high-kicking Time Is Running Out are still underpinned with an existential dread that was all too earthbound.
