GRAMMY® Award-winning English rock titans MUSE release their fiery new single, “Cryogen,” out now on Warner Records. The explosive track is the third taste of the band’s forthcoming tenth studio album, The Wow! Signal, which they announced in a broadcast from space last month and is due to impact Earth on June 26. MUSE will then bring the album’s world directly to fans with an extensive North American amphitheater run, starting with a July 2 headliner at Milwaukee’s Summerfest and culminating at Los Angeles’ iconic Hollywood Bowl on August 31. Listen to ‘Cryogen’ here
“Cryogen” is urgent and explosive across its entire five minutes. After a squelching intro, MUSE let loose a sky-scraping spiral of guitar before plunging into a roiling pool of smashing drums, grinding bass, and dramatic vocals. Throughout it all, Matt Bellamy paints a vivid picture of a man so deep in the thrall of another that he’s envisioned his tormentor as a frozen moon of Jupiter, and himself as a lost speck on the surface: “Winter’s end, she’s Europa, I’m a cracked interloper / Icicles pierce my heart so cruel and quiet / Loneliness, she left me trembling in a polar desert / Wilderness, I’m breaking.” The falsetto-streaked chorus spells out the narrator’s doom: “Cryogen, I can never cry again / Cryogen, I’m freezing over.”
The music and visuals that MUSE have released so far are revealing the new album’s themes bit by bit. The Wow! Signal takes its name from one of the most compelling interstellar mysteries of the last century: a powerful 72-second radio burst detected in 1977 originating from the constellation Sagittarius with a bandwidth and intensity that suggested a possible extraterrestrial source. The astronomer who discovered the anomaly famously circled the now-iconic sequence “6EQUJ5” and wrote “WOW!” on the printout beside it — giving the signal its name and cementing its place in scientific and pop-culture lore.
With every additional transmission from The Wow! Signal, we get a stronger sense of the forces powering MUSE’s new era: a mix of cosmic mystery, existential hope, and the exhilarating possibility of contact with something far greater than ourselves.
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