Black Holes and Revelations by Muse

Black Holes and Revelations, Muse's fourth album, arrived on Warner Bros. and Helium 3 in 2006, and it's the record where the band stopped merely aiming for the stratosphere and started booking flights to Mars. Rich Costey produced it over four months, hopping between London, Milan, New York City and the south of France, and the band threw a wild mix of influences into the blender: Depeche Mode, Sly and the Family Stone, Lightning Bolt, Millionaire and the music of southern Italy.

The subjects are as big as the sound: crooked politics, alien invasion, revolution and New World Order paranoia, with a few straight-up love songs slipped in between the conspiracy theories. "Supermassive Black Hole" struts on a slinky, falsetto-and-fuzz groove, "Starlight" is a wide-open, arms-in-the-air singalong, "Map of the Problematique" throbs with synthesized dread, "Invincible" marches toward a rousing climax, and "Take a Bow" builds from a menacing arpeggio into full-blown apocalypse. Then there's "Knights of Cydonia", a galloping space-western epic that sounds like a spaghetti-western shootout staged on another planet.

It went straight to number one in five countries, the UK among them, and cracked the top 10 in the US, where it went platinum; at home it went quadruple platinum. It pulled in good reviews, a Mercury Prize nomination and more than 4.5 million sales worldwide by 2018, and the tour that followed was captured on the live album HAARP.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.