Album Review: Muse - Drones

It would be a pretty tough critic who’d say Muse needed Drones to be successful for their career to right itself, given 2012’s The 2nd Law didn’t live up to expectations. But it could be fair to say that if this latest record flopped, there might be some questions asked about the band’s legacy.

Lucky, then, that Drones is spectacular, epic in scope, epic in sound, epic in delivery. The tracks released so far, Psycho and Dead Inside (and one or two others, depending on how adept at YouTube searching you are), indicate that the band are back in their comfort zone; a three-piece rock’n’roll behemoth ready to conquer all.

But Drones isn’t just a collection of 12 tracks sewn together to create a powerful album; it’s a conceptual album encompassing a vision of an all-powerful government state, the brainwashing and destruction of a human soul, and the inevitable rebellion and subsequent World War Three that follows.

It’s a powerful narrative made even more dystopian by Matt Bellamy’s lyrics, which are as strong as ever. Even in uplifting moments like Mercy, there’s an overarching sense of despair. Not every track is a winner, with concurrent tracks The Handler and Defector representing a weaker area of the record, but it finishes with a superb duo of songs: the haunting lament of Aftermath and the epic, four-part The Globalist.

Drones can be consumed song by song, but it shouldn’t be. It should be absorbed as an overall piece of work, and a brilliant one at that.