My girlfriend at the time was at a university in London, and I’d come up and stay with her.

“I remember when I first came to London, part-time in the mid-to-late ’90s. With our first comeback show in a long time being in London, The Big Issue seemed like a natural collaboration. And so, when we came to talk about the causes we’d like to get involved with, we thought of you guys. Definitely, that had a bit of influence on the album. Every time I was heading into the studio I’d be walking past people sleeping rough. “The homelessness issue in Los Angeles is pretty severe. It’s in a pretty central high street-type location,” he explains. “We made the album partly in Abbey Road, but the majority was made in LA in our own studio. That’s why the band wanted to make sure the gigs had a larger meaning, alongside the yearned for communal release of a live show.īellamy’s been a regular reader of The Big Issue since he first moved to London in the ’90s, but the 2022 partnership was inspired by experiences much closer to his current home. “I can’t say for sure, but there’s a chance we’ll play a new song at the Apollo shows, which could be fun.” The last time Muse played live was way back in 2019, so any return to the stage is a big deal. “We’re going to the play at least one, maybe two, new songs live before the album comes out,” says Bellamy. The album won’t arrive until the end of August, but a first chance for fans to hear new music might come as early as May 9 and 10, when the band play a pair of comeback shows at London’s Eventim Apollo, in support of The Big Issue, Médecins Sans Frontières and War Child. It’s a new take on all of those types of genres that we’ve touched on in the past.” Or there’s a sort of soft ballad, love song and it’s probably the best ballad love song we’ve ever done, and so on. “That means this album might have a metal track on it – and it’s like, the best metal track we’ve ever done. So it’s almost like we’ve made a record that is a greatest hits album – of new songs. “We were reaching that point where there was talk about maybe doing a greatest hits album,” Bellamy confirms, “and we weren’t really in favour of doing that. The sonic palate was a cheeky riposte to the record label’s preferred next move – the dreaded late era Best Of, so redolent of a band on the slow decline to the nostalgia circuit. Musically, Bellamy says, the songs are a tour through the genres the band has tackled in the past. “But sometimes ‘the will of the people’ can be something to be frightened of.” “‘The will of the people’ is an amazing thing that should be honoured, and democracy should be something we try to protect,” he explains. Its title, Will of the People, refers to Bellamy’s sense of the Janus-faced power of crowds. All the chaos we saw emerging in America, in between the election and the inauguration, has definitely been a big influence on this record.”Ĭonceived in pandemic and domestic political unrest, the album is now being delivered into a world at war. It really gave me a pretty heavy exposure to the American way of life, American politics and all the stuff that went down during that period. “But then during the pandemic I had to stay there and live in LA for two years. “I went to live in America in 2010, but I would always come back to the UK quite a lot,” Bellamy says. Musically, thematically, the end product of those two years may be Muse’s most American record to date.

“I didn’t think I’d miss it as much as I did.” Like so many people who enjoy living away from home only because they can go back whenever they fancy, it was a shock to find himself forcibly exiled from London’s walkable streets and leafy parks, where a man can let his dog run free. Bellamy was in Los Angeles with his wife, American model Elle Evans, and their dogs when Covid hit.

Muse new album