‘You Make Me Feel Like It’s Halloween’ clearly has no business being anywhere near this album, but it emulates the endearingly camp aesthetic of 2018’s Simulation Theory in a way that’s actually pretty fun. It gets to the point where you’re not sure if the album’s most absurd moments are its worst or its best. ![]() The irony is immediately countered by ‘Liberation’, an earnest, Queen-indebted protest song that ends with the awkward proclamation: “I guess we should thank you… For playing your part in our liberation.” For a band with such an ostensibly rebellious spirit, somehow they end up sounding increasingly more complicit in the systems they’re supposed to be tearing down. I’m not sure why it has to creepily invoke ‘Beautiful People’ by Marilyn Manson, except… Is the song actually meant to be satire? An allusion to the January 6 riots? Is that the premise of the entire album? Are we meant to empathize with or be critical of the lovers who, on the dramatic ballad ‘Verona’, take off not just their clothes, but their masks, to taste (ew) “contagion on our lips”? ‘Compliance’ is less ambiguous, but whatever point it tries to make about the evils of the establishment is undercut by its spineless brand of synthpop. ![]() Take the title track, which kicks off the album: surely, an opening mission statement that’s best read as a call to arms in the same vein as ‘Uprising’. Their latest comes off a bit more jumbled and confounding in that regard. As ludicrously unsubtle as these albums may have been, though, at least their intentions were clear and seemingly pure. But given how blatantly the past few years have brought fraught social and economic issues to the surface, it’s probably a wise decision that their commentary this time is less centered on a dystopian reality than “what’s actually happening in the world right now.” If you found Drones or The 2nd Law to be lacking in nuance, you should have no reason to expect that to change on a record called Will of the People, and it doesn’t. Their messaging is as painfully obvious as it is vague, and Will of the People does little to upend the broad political sentiments that have fuelled their albums since Absolution. The people that Muse have been talking about for at least two decades, of course, are not getting what they want. It’s easy to get away with it when you’re giving the people exactly what they want. After all, they make it sound so effortless and familiar: just take the commercial rock formula that’s worked so many times before and amp it up with the usual Muse pyrotechnics. It’s certainly not a difficult sentiment to get behind, but it must take a certain amount of conviction to try and sell a song titled ‘We Are Fucking Fucked’, even if the time and money a major label is willing to invest in you doesn’t always come with the appropriate level of quality control. ![]() Muse, on the other hand, a band that admirably has long abandoned the idea of coolness, naturally had no issue building it out into the grand finale of their ninth album, Will of the People. About two years ago, when the outside world seemed like it was just starting to open up, I imagine there were more than a few bands that got together in a room for the first time in ages and hastily wrote a song containing the phrase: “We are fucking fucked.” I also assume that, in most cases, the instinct would be to collectively laugh it off and start doing serious work.
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