A tenth Muse album is first and foremost a critical combat sport: 68/100 on Album of the Year, aggregated from 19 reviews running from 100 (The Arts Desk) to 20 (Dork), with Metacritic at 71 and the public at 73. Blabbermouth and Classic Rock post 9s, Pitchfork (4.5) and Rolling Stone (4) draw knives, The Needle Drop follows at 40. The full splits — the band’s Olympic discipline for fifteen years now.
What everyone agrees on, fans and sceptics alike: the confidence of the madness. A space concept built around the famous 1977 Wow! signal, production handed to Dan Lancaster pushing the trio toward a more modern sound, Ellie Goulding guesting on « Hush »: the Guardian (8/10) salutes the album’s « commitment to its utterly preposterous bit », and NME goes as far as calling it their best album in twenty years. Even Rolling Stone, prosecuting, spares the more restrained closer « Space Debris ».
What divides: everything else. For Rolling Stone, the music « won’t blow your mind so much as beat it into numb submission » — and the lower half of the aggregate says roughly the same. Solomon’s verdict: if you checked out at Simulation Theory, nothing here will win you back; if you love Muse for the excess, this is their most defensible record in a long while. A 7/10 aggregate — pick your side.