Nightmare Fuel / Muse

With their affinity for grim subject matter cloaked in operatic performances, this band has no shortage of nightmarish musical moments.

Showbiz

• Even on their debut record, the band already begins to set the tone for what is to follow.
  • "Spiral Static," with the way the song seems to loop around you and builds from a subdued, cold rumination upon a possible Sanity Slippage delivered in cavernously low tones to shrill falsetto lines.
  • "Sunburn" is a haunting piano ballad with a nightmarish, shrieking guitar solo and unnerving, tragic chorus. Audible vocal strains in the chorus add to the horror of the song.
  • "Muscle Museum" opens with an eerie, screeching guitar riff and keeps a creepy atmosphere throughout its runtime.
  • "Filip", while largely tame throughout, picks up in intensity right before the final chorus, with a hostile, aggressive instrument reprise of the verse's vocal melody.
  • "Cave" is another aggressive, deranged rock song with a harsh, unhinged sound to it throughout most of its runtime, with another eerie, haunting chorus.
  • The Title Track gradually builds in intensity throughout its runtime, with the aggressive backing instrumental combined with Matt's vocals going from a wailing falsetto to a full-on scream by the end.
    • The lyrics are about having to hold up an image to the public for so long that you start to become it before eventually breaking.
  • "Uno" has a heavy, aggressive bassline and screaming guitar parts, again with more strained vocals and haunting wailing from Matt Bellamy.
  • "Falling Down" and "Sober", though more Tear Jerker, are still bleak and about feeling trapped by fate in one town and never noticed and alcoholic issues. Thankfully both of these problems got better, though.
    • Speaking of "Falling Down", the very raw scream near the end that happens very suddenly.

Origin of Symmetry

• With its towering, dramatic soundscapes and obscure lyricism, this album is rife with the sinister theatricality that would define the band.
  • The creepy last-note nightmare of "New Born", which unexpectedly cuts off the rather upbeat song with a series of distorted electronic vocalizations.
  • "Space Dementia". Never mind the lyrics, something about the atmosphere, and the tortured quality of Matt's voice makes it sound profoundly wrong. That whole song is ridiculous, from the breaking, sinister quality of his voice to the last few seconds with the menacing piano/guitar outro - underscored by sharp falsetto - and the fuzzy distorted blast of sound right at the end that oozes out like in a space vacuum or something.
    • The lyrics themselves deal with the speaker slowly sinking into omnicidal mania and promising something - or someone that they'll "destroy this world for" it. It's ambiguous as to whether the narrator is hallucinating, or being influenced by something much, much worse than a mere hallucination.
    I cut your name in my heart.
    • A possible interpretation of the lyrics is that it's about helpless drug addiction.
  • The opening riff of "Citizen Erased" is undeniably epic to an amazing degree, but it's also extraordinarily harsh and jarring. It's like hearing a guitar screaming abuse in your ear - melodically, but still with real malevolence. The subsequent lyrics are equally harsh. It's often interpreted that this is about how people lose their identity to assimilation and political dogmas or even rape.
  Break me in,
  Teach us to cheat
  And to lie, cover up
  What shouldn't be shared
  And the truth's unwinding
  Scraping away
  At my mind
  Please stop asking me to describe...
  • "Screenager". Tom Waits-inspired percussion featuring real bones, lyrics about disconnecting from other people and self-harm ("hide from the mirror, the cracks and the memories; hide from your family, they won't know you now," as well as the oddly disturbing line, "Stop your screaming, no one can hear." Even just the generally quiet, subdued way the song is performed and the pleas of "who you were was so beautiful, remember who you were" are unsettling in their own way.
  • What "Crawling up the Walls" is to Radiohead, "Micro Cuts" is to Muse. The Moonlight Sonata-inspired chord progression creates a depressing feel and unpredictably explodes into a desperate and psychotic chorus with unintelligible lyrics throughout. Music is a universal language, and even if you can't tell what is being said, it creates a crushing feeling of tortured insanity. And then there's the unexpected fast outro.
    • The lyrics are difficult to make up over Matt's incredibly high-pitched and spine-chilling wailing, but you will regret knowing them if you did. Said lyrics were inspired by vivid hallucinations and nightmares due to dehydration, lack of self-care, and inexplicably strong paranoia. Early live versions, such as the one on Hullabaloo Soundrack, take it up a notch, with Matt's falsetto becoming more of a scream of terror than any sort of singing.
  Hands are red with your blame,
  Megaphone screaming my name
  Whimpers someone I should have loved
  Souls weeping above
  I've seen what you're doing to me
  Destroying puppet strings to our souls

• "Plug In Baby"'s loud feedback screech at the beginning. There's also one in The Groove and and arguably even worse example in Ashamed.
• Feeling Good has a horribly uncomfortable music video with a lot of people with distorted faces. Beware.
• "Megalomania," even more so when performed live. The main backing to Matt's creepily-tranquil tale of derangement and Sanity Slippage is an Ominous Pipe Organ that swirls underneath the verses and explodes in full force in the chorus.
  • To be more specific, the lyrics are about a Crisis of Faith Matt was experiencing at the time. A few nasty standout lines seem to be said from the POV of God talking about how Mary was a virgin and there was no point in creating humanity, and that he wants a new game to play—perhaps being bored and apathetic of humanity.

Useless device, it won't suffice
I want a new game to play
When I am gone, it won't be long
Till I disturb you in the dark
[...]
Take off your disguise!
I know that, underneath, it's me.

Hullabaloo Soundtrack

• "Shrinking Universe", where echoing guitars and pained vocals combine for a chilling effect.
• "Dead Star", a predecessor to "Take A Bow" with lyrics accusing those in power for ruining the state of the earth, filled with looming, heavy riffs, and Matt's primal, slurpy breathing of bottled-up rage.
• The scare factor in "Yes Please" doesn't lie so much within the lyrics themselves as the insane delivery they're sung with, with every line either being whispered or screamed in alternation. Hell, Matt even throws in a few well-placed full-lunged laughs into the mix!

Absolution

• This album is heavy, classical-influenced Hard Rock that plunges deeper and deeper into themes of corruption and entrapment and the futility of salvation, and just gets darker, and darker, and darker, culminating in a song arguably about murder-suicide.
  • Opening track "Apocalypse Please" explodes with crushing piano riffs and the cry that is quoted below the page image — the cover art for the album, which is unsettling in its own way — and only gets more and more ominous with its descriptions of destruction and oblivion.
  • The obsessive nature of the lyrics to "Hysteria." The music video — which is about a nameless man waking up in a trashed hotel room as he relives the recordings of a girl that he stalked before he ends up screaming and thrashes the room in... well, hysteria, — doesn't help at all.
  • A lot of people are also creeped out by the second-last song, "Thoughts of a Dying Atheist". Scares the hell out of me, and the end is all I can see...
  • The music video for "Stockholm Syndrome" renders the figures on screen indistinguishable via a heatsensitive filter. What can be made out doesn't seem pretty, with what appears to black goo, children writing SOS messages on the walls with vomit, and Chris cutting himself.
    • Stockholm Syndrome in general is not a subject for the faint of heart. And the hauntingly soft chorus only serves to make the atmosphere more tense as it builds up to a destructively heavy riff at the very end.
  • "Sing for Absolution" manages to walk the fine line between this and Tear Jerker. Glacial vocals and a gothic soundscape create a delicate, almost hymnal atmosphere. The lyrics do not help with how much they read like a poem for a dead lover.
  Lips are turning blue
  A kiss that can't renew
  I only dream of you
  My beautiful...
  • The very last lines are also particularly chilling:
  Our wrongs remain unrectified
  And our souls won't be exhumed...
  • "Ruled By Secrecy"; what gives that song its impact is the piano solo around the 3 minute mark. A Youtube commenter put it best, in words that can (and are) also applied to the rest of the song: "It's so delicate and beautiful, but sinister and ugly at the same time..."

Black Holes and Revelations

• Themes of political corruption, conspiracies and alien invasions abound on this album.
  • "Take A Bow," with its doom-laden walls of guitars, drums, bass, synths and strings coupled with harsh, accusatory lyrics delivered in a manner akin to operatic fury. And then the discordant Last Note Nightmare, once again.
  Death - you bring death,
  And destruction to all that you touch!
  Pay - you must pay
  You must pay for your crimes against the earth!
  • The Supermassive Black Hole music video, which is peppered with imagery including a room full of mirrors, a tree seemingly made of bone, twisted masks, distorted dancers and strange alien-like creatures who unzip their suits to reveal that they're made of space.

The Resistance

• The dystopian, 1984-esque world painted by the entirety of The Resistance is rather bleak at best, and horrifying at worst.
  • The cut-throat, bloodthirsty lyrics to "Unnatural Selection" give ample proof.
  I'm hungry for some unrest
  I want to push it beyond a peaceful protest
  I wanna speak in a language that they'll understand!
  Dedication, to a new age!
  Is this the end of destruction and rampage?
  Another chance to erase it then repeat it again!
  • "MK Ultra" takes its name from the original CIA mind-control projects and turns it into an anguished allegory of excruciating mind rape.
  • "Exogenesis," a symphony in three movements, combines liberal doses of existential horror with apocalyptic themes and high-strung theatrical orchestration. It eventually resolves itself into a hopeful ending, though.
    • What's especially worth a mention is the first movement, AKA "Overture". It very much captures the feeling of cold and endless space with its grand instrumentation, ticking beat, and ghostly falsetto vocals borrowed from "Micro Cuts".

The 2nd Law

• This album tells the story of a deteriorating planet that its inhabitants can no longer live on. Major themes include societal collapse, totalitarianism, and the titular Second Law of Thermodynamics
  • The song "Unsustainable," in both the promotional trailer for the album and in the actual music video. To wit; the song is a mish-mash of symphonic strings, electronic howls and screams, flat robotic voices reading off the Second Law Of Thermodynamics and thundering drums - all capped off with Matt's signature (albeit wordless) wailing floating on top.
    • In the album trailer there's people running from a jagged THING tearing up the ground behind them in broad daylight, the Jump Scare you may get when the creepy, CREEPY TV Head Robot debuts, and the fact that Earth is apparently so messed up at this point that it costs $999.99 for around 15 gallons of gas.
  • The sequel, Isolated System follows the people from the previous video who are running from this strange relentless wave which twitches in time to the underlying heartbeat throughout the track. Early in the video one of the runners trips and is consumed by the wave, curling up as it reduces him into a poorly rendered human figure and then a frame-skeleton, and finally nothing.
    • Musically, "Isolated System" is a desolate piano piece accompanied by wordless vocalizing. It's simultaneously uncanny and poignant.
  • "Animals" is a tranquil, yet frightening condemnation of bloodthirsty capitalists. Similar to "Screenager," the song is mostly quiet and subdued except for a dark riff that erupts twice, and yet every note quavers with barely-restrained incandescence. The last thing you hear is voice samples from Wall Street trading floors.
    • Combined with the animated video, it can become truly haunting. The video in question is animated in muted colors and takes place in a world where shadow-black and monster-like businessmen find ways to bring their company's debt to zero...by first going door to door of sad and chubby white creatures and taking their money. When that's not effective enough, they resort to ripping these people's limbs off (thankfully, it's Bloodless Carnage, but still!) and dumping them into a machine to generate money from. Then when it's not efficient enough, the businessmen turn on each other in desperation and tear each other apart until they have all been dumped into the machine themselves
  • The lyrics to "Survival," while awesome, can be quite disturbing as it is exactly what The Social Darwinist would say. It's left ambiguous how far the character will go to win.
  I won't forgive, vengeance is mine!

Drones

• Drones doesn't pull punches in its depiction of a war-torn world, and the effect it has on its protagonist - a woman who enlists in the army to trace her missing lover, unaware of what he has truly become.
  • "Psycho" takes the already unpleasant concept of military hazing and makes it truly despicable, by using it to brainwashing people to become psychopaths, capable of killing a person on command. It doesn't help that the lyrics make it sound so easy - they're from the point of view of a completely brutal drill sergeant who is intent on breaking the female protagonist and turning her into a ruthless killing machine.
  • Its follow-up, "Mercy", is probably even more anguished: its lyrics are basically a desperate cry for help from the female protagonist, who is now brainwashed and wants nothing more than a way out from the situation she's in.
  • And then comes "Reapers." Maniacal instrumentation runs alongside frenzied lyrics that alternate between denouncing the war she's stuck in and not being able to "handle the truth," peaks at a crazed guitar solo and culminates in waves of ear-splitting, shrill feedback and shrieks of "HERE COME THE DRONES!" Over and over and over.
  • "The Handler" has the protagonist finally break out, albeit haunted by how she has now become "a cold and impassive machine." An ominous bassline lurks under the call to "behold [her] transformation" - which begets the question of just what may have happened to her and what she might become after shrugging off her chains.
  • The Globalist. Just, The Globalist. The concept of Drones has already been terrifying up to this point. But now, the second protagonist has been successfully brainwashed and what does he do? He declares nuclear war and destroys the world all within a matter of minutes! And after that, he suddenly breaks, has a My God, What Have I Done? moment and vents to to his former love interest, who is the only person on earth other than him, with true remorse.
    • The music doesn't help matters either. It's all calm and dandy until 4:32, when one of the darkest riffs in Muse's career suddenly erupts and tears in, heralded by eerie vocalising. There's a distorted countdown to top it all off too.
  • And it's immediately followed by "Drones". All Matt harmonizing with himself, the protagonist singing about how the world has now been left desolate by his own actions.

Will of The People

• "Will of the People" does an excellent job in confusing listeners with vague and uncanny music videos (presented in an Anachronic Order, with a side of many, many possible ways the story could be interpreted) and lyrical themes that make this essentially one massive Ironic Echo of The Resistance.
  • Look closely at that "old Matt" in the video for "Won't Stand Down". If you look closely enough, you'll realize that's not his face, but someone wearing a shockingly accurate mask of his face.
  • The title track is an upbeat, glam-rocky anthem and Protest Song in the vein of their iconic hit "Uprising". Except the video that portrays the masses tearing down bust of the members of the band and then revealing that the leaders of these masses are Muse themselves, plus lyrics like "We'll throw the baby out with the bathwater", and hidden samples of vocals hidden in the chorus singing "the will of the sheeple" show the power of revolutions in a darker light.
  • "Compliance" is a light, synthy bop that doesn't try ''too'' hard to mask lyrics about seducing innocent people into being deceived and controlled by a greater power. The more you listen to it, the more it begins to sound like the march of brainwashed masses.
  • "Won't Stand Down" has a music video centered around an older and creepier version of Matt mind-controlling a room full of soldiers.
  • "You Make Me Feel Like It's Halloween" has a video filled with lots and lots of Mind Screw and the constant feeling of being trapped and confused, with all of the antics going on in the Haunted House. It's worse if you know the lyrics, which are about desperately trying to survive with a domestic abuser.
  • "Kill Or Be Killed" is a hopeless lament at how Humans Are Bastards and that we have no hope surviving without having to push other people down.
  • And the closer, "We Are Fucking Fucked", pulls no punches in its proclamations of us all being doomed and the world falling into an increasingly chaotic state with explicitly apocalyptic lyrics.
  You really believe
  We can survive all of this?
  The black vacuum of the universe, it was designed
  To swallow us whole
  It's a losing game
  We're at death's door, another world war
  Wildfires and earthquakes I foresaw
  A life in crisis, a deadly virus
  Tsunamis of hate are gonna find us

Misc.

• "Con-Science" and "Host" are both extremely dark B Sides, with brooding instrumentation and cold, detached vocals. The former is very bleak and noisy with an unnerving buildup and the later pulls no punches in comparing an abusive relationship to having a parasite.
• "Execution Commentary," which is a mass of incoherent screaming paced to a looming rock beat. What's really creepy about this is that it's not known what the lyrics are, or even if the song has any. Either that, or it's plainly the funniest song they've ever made.

---