Marcel Winatschek

Control Is a Frequency

MK Ultra, buried near the end of Muse’s The Resistance, is the album’s most unhinged moment and somehow its most focused. The title references the CIA’s cold war mind-control program—the one that was real, the one that got declassified, the one Matt Bellamy has clearly read about sixteen times. It opens with a riff that sounds like a transmission being jammed and never really settles after that. Bellamy sings about frequency control, invisible cages, the colonization of thought. You can roll your eyes at the paranoia or let it work on you—depending on the week, I do both.