Muse Release New Single “Cryogen” + Tenth Album “The Wow! Signal” Arrives This June

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. Pre-order 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.”

Despite the frigid theme, Cryogen is all fireworks, all the time. The song was written and produced by MUSE with Dan Lancaster (Bring Me The Horizon, Blink-182) — who performs keys and additional guitar in the MUSE live band — with additional production from Aleks von Korff. That’s the same team behind March’s hopeful lead single Be With You, a powerful swirl of driving electronica and searing stadium rock that DORK predicted will “undoubtedly become a euphoric festival favourite in the summers to come.”

MUSE literally launched Be With You from space for their The Wow! Signal announcement (see a snippet HERE), beaming back footage of the music video streaming on a specially designed tablet 20 miles up into the atmosphere. The cinematic visual directed by Nico Paolillo (Deafheaven, BAD OMENS) and starring Ella Balinska (The Occupant, Resident Evil) offers instant immersion into the universe of the album. While the announcement was widely covered by the likes of Pitchfork, NME, Consequence, Kerrang!, and Billboard, Be With You earned 3 million global streams in the first week and became the #1 Most Added at Alternative Radio, where it has since climbed to #9.

Following the album news, MUSE made a grand live return to London with a special performance at the 5,000-capacity O2 Academy Brixton, a room they hadn’t played since 2001. The show won rave reviews from outlets including The Times (five stars), Kerrang! (“MUSE don’t miss”), and NME, who noted that fans had camped out overnight to secure a spot close to the stage. The publication also turned in an early review of Cryogen, which MUSE debuted that night: “A blast of classic MUSE harking back to their ’00s days with wailing riffs, [an] arena-destroying chorus, and painting an apocalyptic sci-fi landscape.”

MUSE also performed fan-favourite The Wow! Signal ​track Unravelling, which they released last year to instant acclaim and a flurry of album rumours. With arpeggiated synths that crash into a colossal wall of barbed riffs, the single racked up praise from outlets including Rolling Stone (“transcendent”) Guitar World (“endlessly gratifying”), and DIY Magazine, who lovingly called the song “balls-to-the-wall maximalist.”

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. Connect with MUSE at one of the dates below.

MUSE, The WOW! Signal
​1. The Dark Forest
​2. Nightshift Superstar
​3. Shimmering Scars
​4. Cryogen
​5. Be With You
​6. Hexagons
​7. The Sickness In You & I
​8. Unravelling
​9. Hush
​10. Space Debris

Pre-Order HERE