The Wow! Signal: An album named after the universe said hello once.
For anyone not spiralling about this yet: on 15 August 1977, the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State picked up a 72-second burst out of the constellation Sagittarius. one narrow blast, just one narrow blast, and it's LOUD way louder than all the background hiss around it., sitting almost exactly on the hydrogen line of 1420 MHz, which is the one frequency every SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence)theory says a civilisation would broadcast on, because hydrogen is the most common element in the universe and any species doing physics would land on it too. it's called the "cosmic watering hole" for a reason. Jerry Ehman the astronomer saw the printout, saw the intensity code 6EQUJ5, and wrote Wow! in red pen next to it.
and then it never happened again... Ehman pointed the dish back at that patch of sky over and over for years. nothing. decades of follow-up, nothing. 49 years of silence. either we imagined the most compelling thing we've ever heard or "something" saw us once...and decided we weren't worth a second message. but of course, Matt Bellamy will always try to convince us that there's something out there.
So.. when they announced The Wow! Signal and launched the news 33 kilometers into the atmosphere on a tablet, the only reasonable response was: of course they did.
Track one is "The Dark Forest" the title lifts straight from Liu Cixin's Three-Body Problem : the theory that the cosmos isn't empty, it's just terrified. Everyone's hiding. The first civilization to shout its location into the black gets annihilated by something bigger and more frightened, so the smart ones go silent. Space as a forest full of armed hunters holding their breath. It's the bleakest possible answer to "why is it so quiet up there".
"Nightshift Superstar" looks like the easy disco dance, but it's the sneakiest track with full disco, slap bass, kids' choir, sounding like a love song about some dazzling girl who only comes alive at night, "burning bright," the narrator mesmerised and caught in her gravity. but watch the video and it flips: she's controlling people, making them float, bending the room to different rules and suddenly "running from the light" and "I split in two" aren't about a club girl at all, but something not human hiding as the most ordinary thing imaginable, smuggling the album's alien-contact theme inside a disco banger, so you think it's about a person when it's really about contact and about being chosen and changed by something far bigger that looks just human enough to let you close. she basically is the Wow! signal: blinding, magnetic, gone before you can prove what you saw.
"Cryogen" is the heavy one and made me so excited with the riff-driven, gothic, full Origin of Symmetry / Black Holes energy. Ahhh i loveeee muse because of this. This song sounds like it should be about cryosleep, hmm..is it? but it's actually a breakup song where Bellamy turns the woman who wrecked him into Europa, Jupiter's frozen moon: "she's Europa, I'm a cracked interloper," a tiny lost speck freezing solid on her surface, icicles through the heart, "I can never cry again." heartbreak as deep-space frostbite. and the music video...the band playing on a frozen lake at the base of a blood-red waterfall, ice crawling up their arms, while Bellamy crosses an endless polar desert hunting for something buried under the ice, until that ring-shaped UFO from "Be With You" rises out of the sea, fires a beam of red light, and cuts to black. so the heartbreak song is secretly an alien-contact song? and another thing about the setting of the MV, okay im not a believer but... the second I saw him crossing a frosty wasteland toward the thing hidden beneath the ice, my brain went straight to the ice wall theoryyy.. that same fantasy of a frozen edge of the world with something kept on the other side we're not meant to reach. I think muse give a wink at those ice wall people lol then black out the screen right before you're allowed to see what it means. I don't think matt believes it its just that he knows the itch and dangles it on purpose. the ice always means there's more, and you're not cleared to look.
"Be With You" is the one they launched off the planet in space!! the lead single, opening on a huge, haunting church organ with Matt hollowed out: "my light's been swallowed up, I've used up every ounce of luck," before it detonates into synths and guitar rock as he flips to devotion: "it can't just be with anyone, it's got to be with you." sounds like a love song, but stacked into this album it plays more like contact.. rock bottom, reaching for a higher power, something reaching back. it even buries Dylan Thomas's "rage against the dying of the light" in there (the same poem from Interstellar), so the love song is secretly about refusing to go quiet and reaching for the stars as your own light dies. and the video sells it: a blood-red halo on the moon, Ella Balinska pulled toward it, finding a stranger feeling the same pull, both staring up at something gorgeous and unsettling, with that ring-shaped UFO that later resurfaces in "Cryogen" same ache of contact that leaves you stranded. Also the fact that they "launched it from space" (it went 20 miles up; space starts at 62), debuting a song called Be With You by flinging it at the sky... so who exactly does he want to be with? not a person. the thing on the other end of the signal. it's a love song addressed to the "higher power". eyyy power weyh..
"Hexagons" is the show-off track and the paranoid one at once. it opens with over a minute of Bellamy just going off with synths, guitars, cinematic drums, before a single word and it leans dark. a hexagon is the universe's favourite control shape .. clean, repeating, locking together with no gaps (honeycomb, or that eerie real hexagon storm on Saturn's north pole). Bellamy uses it as a system you can't escape: the song opens on a puppet with "severed strings" who still isn't free. then the chorus:
Our resistance is mass-produced And she will ghostwrite my obsessions Reach out, touch me And draw me from the sixth dimension You have been forcing my hand
peak Muse and the philosophy that even your rebellion was manufactured and sold back to you, and whatever's reaching in from a higher dimension isn't here to free you. which loops back to the album's core question: if something bigger finally makes contact, does it lift us up or just own us? "Hexagons" picks the scary answer.. order so perfect it becomes a cage. A concept the he always bring again and again.
"Unravelling" is the first one Muse dropped it back in June 2025, a full year before the album, where Matt gone full operatic over a riff-heavy meltdown. fittingly, it's also the one that's literally about falling apart. it's a relationship decaying in real time.. "our love is an unlit script no one can memorise, redacted and revised," "your eyes go cold at sunrise," "this is a hymn for our love with no God and no throne." faith and love collapsing in the same breath. and the killer image, the one Muse teased for months before anyone knew what it was: "an insect trapped in amber, I'm a fading pulse." something preserved forever but completely dead ...frozen mid-motion, beautiful, gone. which is the whole album in one line, imho.. every track here is about reaching for something...something out there..a higher power, a signal from space and getting back silence, cold, or a perfect dead stillness. the Wow! signal itself is an insect in amber: one burst, caught forever on a printout, never moving again. "Unravelling" is just that same heartbreak pointed at a person instead of the stars. the contact fades, the glow dies inside your bones, and you're left holding the amber.
and that's why I love this album so much. it's not just another space themed album..Muse didn't just slap stars on the cover; they built a whole record about the ache of reaching into the dark and what it costs you, whether the thing answering is a lover, a god, or something with a ring-shaped ship and no plan to be kind. every song is a different way of sending the signal out and waiting.
and fully as someone who lives for this stuff: it's dropping in the same season the whole culture's gone alien-mad like Spielberg's alien film in decades is in cinemas, contact and disclosure suddenly everywhere at once. I'm not saying it means anything. but it feels like a wave, like everyone's tuned to 1420 MHz at the same time, all looking up at the same patch of sky. like the signal we sent out finally reached someone, and this is the part where the answer comes back.
keep your eyes on the sky. like spilberg said in Disclosure Day "Dont Be Afraid Of What You Don't Know"
