Muse Learns to Crawl

Madness arrived as possibly the most un-Muse thing Muse had done up to that point—no walls of guitar, no apocalyptic riff, just a bass line doing something almost R&B and Matt Bellamy’s falsetto reaching for something tender and slightly self-conscious. The rest of The 2nd Law would go on to include dubstep drops and stadium anthems built for Olympic closing ceremonies, but this single sat apart from all of it. Slow, unguarded, a little embarrassing in a way I found hard to resist.