The Resistance by Muse

The Resistance, Muse's fifth album, arrived on 14 September 2009 through Warner Bros. and the band's own Helium-3 imprint, and it's the sound of three lads from Teignmouth deciding that a rock album was too small a canvas. Matt Bellamy produced it himself, and the band spent from September 2008 to May 2009 building it at their own studio in Como, Italy, with Bellamy on vocals, guitar and keys, Chris Wolstenholme on bass and Dominic Howard on drums.

It's rock stirred with orchestras and electronics, and the lyrics are all politics and paranoia: oppressive power and the itch to rise up against it. "Uprising" struts on a glam stomp, "Undisclosed Desires" slinks along on a synthetic pulse, and the centerpiece is "Exogenesis", a symphony in three parts that runs 13 minutes and never blinks. Some critics found it overblown, and they have a point; most praised the ambition, the playing and Bellamy's soaring voice anyway.

The gamble paid: it won Best Rock Album at the 53rd Grammys, topped the charts in 19 countries, cracked the top five in the US and sold more than five million copies, making it Muse's most successful album. It also helped seal their status as one of the world's big stadium acts.

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