Muse Go Disco: 'Nightshift Superstar' Leads Tenth Album 'The Wow! Signal'

Muse released "Nightshift Superstar" on September's rollout of their tenth studio album, 'The Wow! Signal', and the track pairs a driving funk bassline with disco rhythms, orchestral arrangements and choir vocals.

It is, by the band's standards, almost danceable.

The song is described by the band's camp as a collision of hard rock and French house (the late-1990s Parisian strain of dance music built on filtered disco loops). Matt Bellamy sings about a dangerously irresistible attraction: sleepless nights, desire, and surrendering to the moment. The restless energy of the lyrics, reviewers note, is matched by the track's relentless groove.

What is on the rest of 'The Wow! Signal'?

The album takes its name from the Wow! signal, an unexplained radio burst detected from space in 1977 that has fascinated astronomers and science-fiction enthusiasts for decades. For a band whose catalogue has long orbited technology and cosmic mystery, the reference is on brand.

Muse introduced the record with unusual theatrics:

• "Hexagons" was unlocked through an international scavenger hunt spanning Sydney, Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York, Paris and London.
• "Cryogen" delivers the band's familiar grand-scale rock sound.
• "Be With You" takes a more hopeful emotional turn, with a cinematic video directed by Nico Paolillo and starring actress Ella Balinska.

The band also launched "Be With You" from space as part of the album announcement. Ordinary promotional campaigns, one gathers, were deemed insufficient.

Do the numbers back the ambition?

They do. "Be With You" generated 3 million streams in its first week and became the No. 1 most-added song at alternative radio before climbing to No. 5 on the chart.

Those figures confirm the appetite for a group now twenty-plus years into a career of finding new ways to make rock music sound enormous.

Where does this leave the band?

'The Wow! Signal' gathers several of Muse's musical personalities under one roof: the theatrical rock arrangements remain, but they now share space with disco, electronic production and genre-crossing detours. "Nightshift Superstar" is the clearest proof — the groove of a dance record, the scale of a rock anthem, and enough twists to keep listeners guessing.

The verdict: Muse have taken their fixation with the cosmos and given it a funky soundtrack, and the tenth album suggests a band still unwilling to repeat itself.