Muse

Their debut album, Showbiz (1999), produced by John Leckie—the same producer who had worked with Radiohead on The Bends—put them on the map. The singles "Cave" and "Muscle Museum" played on European radios, but it was the darker tracks like "Sunburn" that defined their essence: guitars that twist, basslines that growl, and lyrics about loneliness in small towns. The album sold 700,000 copies without the need for major tours, but the real turning point came with Origin of Symmetry (2001). Here, Bellamy took his obsession with classical piano to another level: songs like "Plug In Baby" don’t sound like rock, but like a symphonic suite with distortion. The band was no longer a promise; they were a phenomenon crossing borders. Absolution (2003) cemented that leap: tracks like "Time Is Running Out" blended grandiloquent choruses with grooves reminiscent of funk, while the cover—an astronaut in freefall—summed up their aesthetic: controlled chaos, as if they were playing on the edge of an abyss. By then, they no longer needed comparisons to anyone. They had found their own language.

On Black Holes and Revelations (2006), the sound became even more ambitious. Recorded between France, Italy, and England, the album blends space rock with touches of electronics and even a nod to Italian music in "Supermassive Black Hole." The title track sounds like a cosmic anthem, with a bass that seems to come from the depths of the universe and guitars that mimic the sirens of interstellar ships. The album took them to play at the Rome Olympic Stadium in front of 60,000 people, a moment captured in HAARP (2008), a live album that captures that energy: Howard pounding the cymbals as if each strike were a heartbeat of the planet, Wolstenholme moving the bass like a battering ram, and Bellamy challenging the audience with notes that seem impossible. By then, they were no longer a band; they were a spectacle in themselves.

With The Resistance (2009) and Drones (2015), they won two Grammy Awards for Best Rock Album and proved they could evolve without losing their essence. The former is a rock opera about human resistance, with choruses reminiscent of Queen and guitars that mimic war hymns. The latter, Drones, is a concept album about dehumanization, where bass and drums create oppressive atmospheres, as if the album itself were a battlefield. In between, The 2nd Law (2012) took them into electro and dubstep, but even in their riskiest experiments, there’s always something that gives them away: that bass that throbs like a heart, those guitars that seem written to be screamed in a stadium, and that obsession with turning every song into a journey. It doesn’t matter if the stage is a club in Manchester or the O2 Arena in London: when Muse takes the stage, they don’t play music. They build cathedrals of sound.