Matt Bellamy of Muse Discusses New Album, ‘Will Of The People’
Matt Bellamy has given NME a run down of some of the themes behind the new Muse album, Will Of The People.
Talking about the title track, Bellamy says, “It’s like a populist parody, almost the antithesis to [2009 track] Uprising. Whereas Uprising was almost populist but taking it seriously, Will Of The People is almost, ‘Do we know that we’re stupid now? Do we know how silly this sounds and looks?’ Inside of me, there’s always been this little bit of a conflict between the desire for direct democracy and a bit more actual power to the people, but then at the same time realising that sometimes the people can be mad… Because they’ve had no voice for so long, [populism] ends up becoming distorted and strange and spiting everything. People end up spiting things just because they don’t have any say.”
Matt went on to clarify the inspiration behind the song Liberation, “If anything that was more leaning towards what I felt seeing the Black Lives Matter protests. I’m not gonna try to claim to have any understanding of what that culture’s been through or anything, but ‘intend to erase your place in history’ was that feeling of anger… that emotion that you feel in the moment of revolution, where you just want to tear it down and destroy this, even to the extent of changing history itself – people pulling statues down. And “you stole the airwaves but the air belongs to us” – if anything that was a reference to what we were living through, waking up to a mental tweet every day… that hijack of public discourse by one person.”
Talking about the band’s decision to base the album on real world issues, Matt Bellamy said, “Thematically we went into fantasy Metaverse fictional world a little bit on the last album, which I like, and I think we’ll go back there again in the future and go even weirder, just become a bunch of avatars and download ourselves into the metaverse. But the idea was: the next one, let’s make it a bit more about what’s actually happening in the world right now. That was the end of 2019 [when] we made that decision. What I didn’t know was what was about to happen.”