Muse’s Matt Bellamy has said that the band wanted to return to their musical roots when recording new album Drones, telling Rolling Stone: "Our intention was to go back to how we made music in the early stages of our career, when we were more like a standard three-piece rock band with guitar, bass and drums."
While he is proud of his band’s last three albums, he admits that they got distracted in the control room. "We probably spent more time in the control room, fiddling with knobs and synths and computers and drum machines than actually playing together as a band," he said. "As I look back at the last three albums, each one had progressively less and less songs that we could play live."
So instead of self-producing, they decided to bring in Robert "Mutt" Lange (AC/DC’s Back In Black, Def Leppard’s Hysteria). "Before I met him I wasn't sure," Bellamy said of Lange. "I didn't want us to be turned into a kind of Top 40 act." However, Lange was “totally into the concept. He is the kind of person to get into the mind of the artist and whatever the artist wants."
Bellamy also discussed where the drone concept for the album came from, telling Rolling Stone that he first had the idea two years ago when he was reading the book ‘Predators: The CIA's Drone War on al Qaeda’ by Dartmouth professor Brian Glyn Williams.
"I was shocked," he shared. "I didn't know how prolific drone usage has been. I always perceived Obama as an all-around likable guy. But from reading the book, you find out that most mornings he wakes up, has a breakfast and then goes down to the war room and makes what they call 'kill decisions.' He makes that decision based on a long chain of intelligence people who, as we all know, can be very unreliable."
Speaking of new single ‘Dead Inside’, Bellamy said it is about “someone having something bad happen to them, but they choose not to feel it but become dead inside.”
Watch Muse's video for 'Dead Inside':
"Then they go on and become vulnerable to these dark, oppressive forces, which are more than happy to take advantage of people like that,” he continued.
Meanwhile, tracks such as ‘Psycho’, ‘Mercy’ and ‘Reapers’ are about “being overcome by these oppressive forces”.
The Muse frontman also briefly discussed his band’s upcoming tour, saying that they want to “integrate the old songs with the new songs…The goal is to create a sort of abstract narrative, not necessarily a specific story."
He also touched upon the argument that the concept of an album is dead, asying that iTunes and streaming services have made the single “a more easy thing to access…What that's done has made the album as a collection of songs almost meaningless. But an album that has a concept or story or reason to be an album, if anything, has more meaning now than it ever has."
