Muse: Madness

There’s this moment in the song where everything drops out and it’s just Matt Bellamy’s voice, naked and fractured, before the production crashes back in like a building collapsing. I’ve always loved Muse for that—the way they’ll write something genuinely anthemic and then wrap it in so much bombast and self-awareness that you can’t tell if they’re sincere or taking the piss. Maybe they can’t tell either. Madness works because it catches that exact tension: a stadium-sized confection that knows it’s stupid and doesn’t care. The lyrics are hokey as hell, but the architecture of the thing, the way it builds and collapses, has stuck with me for years. It’s the sound of someone brilliant with too many ideas and no editor, which is basically Muse in a nutshell.