To spend time with Matt Bellamy is to lie down willingly in the fast lane of the information superhighway. Within moments of settling into the corner table of a Primrose Hill café, the dressed-down but higher-thinking Muse frontman is in full flow, dissecting the present and future of artificial intelligence like a thousand-mile-an-hour TED talk made flesh. It’s such brain-stretching stuff that you feel like a blinking, newborn AI being turned on for the first time.
“Sam Altman is the king of AI, but he’s the most frightened of it,” says the most brainiac of stadium rockers, his keen interest in investing in Silicon Valley clean energy companies having made him privy to talks by the Zuckerbergs and Altmans of the tech-bro world. “Deadly serious, he’s like, ‘there’s a 10 per cent chance this is going to end humanity’. Well don’t f***ing do it then! Turn it off!” The dark side, Bellamy says, might be “redundancy, depression, and worst-case scenarios where we’re essentially passing on the baton, evolutionary speaking, to the next species and our best hope is that we’re going to be their pets.”
The bright side? The possibility that a self-replicating AI, lacking enough resources to expand, might dismiss the Earth and humanity as irrelevant and head straight into space, leeching energy and materials for more AI from the moon, the asteroid belt and the sun. “I imagine, in a few decades, there’ll be a Saturn ring of data centres around Earth and it will eventually start to orbit the moon, and then eventually the sun,” Bellamy predicts. “That gives me a little bit of hope that it doesn’t have as big an incentive as we think to destroy us.”
Bad news for fans of sunlight, good news for fans of blockbuster early Muse records such as Origin of Symmetry, Absolution and Black Holes and Revelations. After a string of recent albums themed around the ecological and political descent of humanity into drone warfare, energy collapse and societal chaos — 2022’s Will of the People ended with a howl of tech-rock despair called We are F***ing F***ed — new record The Wow! Signal returns to the stargazing narratives of classic hits like Supermassive Black Hole, Starlight and Knights of Cydonia. The title refers to a 72-second radio signal from the Sagittarius constellation detected in Ohio in 1977, marked “Wow!” by scientists for its strength and still one of our likeliest possibilities of extraterrestrial contact.
“I love that mystery in our own minds,” Bellamy says. “Why is it we don’t want to be alone? I have it, we all have it, why are we so desperately looking for something out there? Thousands of years ago, it would have been gods and the stars, but now it’s becoming ‘why is there f***ing nothing out there?’ It’s getting annoying now, we want it so badly.”
He is frustrated that the recent release of a third batch of UFO files by the US government didn’t turn out to be a real-life Disclosure Day. “I find it hard to believe there’s a creature involved but I think it’s quite possible that some technology that we don’t understand has either been around us or through the Earth at some point or maybe even crashed here, or was here before we were here, or maybe we’re part of it. But why is it always such crap footage? My iPhone’s better than your fighter jet. Stick an iPhone on your fighter jet!”
Not that alien contact is to be invited, of course. The album’s opening track The Dark Forest — one of Muse’s hugest, grandest songs (which is saying something) with its Doctor Who synths, desert-planet gallop and operatic overtures of Latin-chanting choirs — references a theory that the universe appears dark and empty because advanced civilisations know the dangers of being visible to intergalactic predators. “As soon as a species becomes truly intelligent, they shut up because they realise what’s out there,” Bellamy explains. “A lot of the most popular sci-fi films tend to depict this idea that it’s going to be a friendly, lovely force, whatever’s out there. But it might not be. I think it’s 50-50 as to what we meet first.”
You don’t need to dig far into The Wow! Signal’s imagery of romance as disintegrating space debris, inter-dimensional beings controlling our lives and ice queens out to “freeze my blood into diamonds” to realise that, at 48, Bellamy isn’t only singing about space stuff. Last October he split up with his wife, model and actor Elle Evans, and for several months became a full-time single father to their two young children.
“It was a very, very rough period,” he admits. “It was the most difficult year of my life from a personal point of view. I had to cancel a tour because I had to look after the children alone.” For the first time since his split with actor Kate Hudson in 2014, Bellamy felt truly rudderless. “The album weaves together some reality with personal life, but mixed with being cast into the unknown again,” he says. “Of like, ‘I don’t know what the future looks like anymore, I don’t know what anything looks like anymore’. And almost, dare I say it, seeking a higher power.”
“What is it that draws you into the realms of chaos and the unknown? It’s when your own life is like that”
Matt Bellamy
Not being religious, he sought it among the stars. “When you go through the most difficult times in your life even the most rational mind, even the most empirical mind, can suddenly taste the unknown for a minute, and start to want to think about spiritual things, or in my case alien intelligence or what’s out there. The mysteries of the universe came back to me. What is it that draws you into the realms of the chaos and the unknown? It’s when your own life is like that.”
Luckily, in times of deepest need, Bellamy’s music flows. “I went back to my childhood, my parents separating and going through these very rocky periods, and some of these rocky periods are where I made music the most naturally,” he says. “There was no, ‘I’ve got to make an album now’, it was like, ‘I’ve got to make music, otherwise I’m going to die’. Music became a survival thing, emotionally speaking.”
What emerged, over sessions in Bellamy’s hometown of Los Angeles and bassist Chris Wolstenholme’s studio in London, were some of the most exposed and personal songs Bellamy had ever committed to record. “I had to just let rip on this one,” he says of anguished tracks like Shimmering Scars, Unravelling and The Sickness In You & I. “I just had to get it out. Singing those things was very emotional. Space Debris, it was hard for me to even get through it. When you’re caught up in attempting to understand your own abilities to navigate difficulty, music becomes a solution, it becomes a catharsis.”
They also explored their most extreme sounds — extreme grandiosity, extreme noise and extreme pop. As rock’s finest proponent of the stadium rock space opera, Bellamy pours scorn on Claude and pals for their predictable chord structures. He plans to lean further into the unpromptable. “AI is so trained on pop music that it’s embarrassing,” he says. “The formulaic can just be regurgitated by AI quite easily. The only reason to really do something is if it’s something that AI can’t do.”
His firehose of thought swings towards the dangers to US democracy: “It’s holding up at the moment … America, I think, might be going the other way at some point … but democracy is over if [Trump] gets a third term”. To the bonfire of British politics: “At some point they’ve got to get the message that they can’t keep replacing the person who was elected with somebody who wasn’t elected.” And to the rise of Reform. “I look back and I feel like I was sensing this populist movement coming,” says this self-proclaimed “radical centrist” who wrote the rabble-rousing glam-rock rallying cry Uprising back in 2009. “It ended up coming in a format I didn’t necessarily like. I thought it might be coming in a redistribution type of scenario but it came in a more old-school populist vibe.”
Through this testing period of personal and political turmoil, however, Bellamy has lost none of his bright edge. He lights up at the thought of bringing The Wow! Signal themes to the stage in fittingly breathtaking style. “It’ll feel like pure Muse again,” he promises, “although there’s always a risk that we’re gonna go Stonehenge.”
The Wow! Signal by Muse is out now
