Muse organized a treasure hunt

A global treasure hunt: fragments of songs hidden in the digital codes of huge billboards between Sydney, New York, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Paris and London. On the weekend, i Muses they challenged their fans to piece together a sound puzzle scattered across the globe and, piece by piece, the mystery was revealed. Today that secret is in the public domain: it’s called “Hexagons”the band’s new single.

The song is the latest release from their highly anticipated tenth studio album, “The Wow! Signal“. It joins a trail of previews that has already seen the birth of the nostalgic “Unravelling”, the epic “Be With You” and the apocalyptic nuances of “Cryogen”.

With “Hexagons”, Matt Bellamy and his companions turn off the machines of modern pop to make a step back in timestraight to the roots of their discography. The atmospheres are those of the early 2000s: the intricate and otherworldly electronic textures that had made “Origin Of Symmetry” (2001) iconic return, fused with the exasperated theatricality and celestial falsettos of “Black Holes And Revelations” (2006).

The track opens with a powerful instrumental section, a wall of sound that takes the listener on an almost cinematic journey. Then, suddenly, the music becomes intimate and Bellamy’s voice is reduced to a vulnerable whisper:

I’m a marionette with severed strings / Gorge on my soul while I’m weak and dying

It is a continuous game of tensions: the music rises, creates an old-fashioned suspense and collapses a moment before the chorus. It is here that the piece finds its propulsive thrust, dragged by a magnetic falsetto and by a band that progressively regains altitude, giving voice to a science fiction cry for help: “Our resistance is mass-produced / And she will ghost write my obsessions. / Reach out, touch me / And draw me from the sixth dimension / You have been forcing my hand”.

This interdimensional journey is no accident. “Hexagons” aligns perfectly with the pulsating core of the new album, conceived by the band as a uniting manifesto “cosmic mystery, existential hope and the electrifying possibility of contact with something infinitely greater than ourselves”.

The album’s title itself delves into one of the most fascinating astronomical mysteries of the last century. We have to go back to 1977, when a radio telescope intercepted a very powerful radio pulse lasting 72 seconds coming from the constellation of Sagittarius. In intensity and frequency, that signal seemed anything but natural. When the astronomer who analyzed the data printed on paper noticed the anomaly, he circled the sequence of letters and numbers 6EQUJ5 and, overwhelmed by amazement, wrote a single word in the margin: “WOW!”.

That echo from deep space is about to turn into music. The appointment with the unknown is set: “The Wow! Signal” will land in stores and on streaming platforms next June 26th.