“Knights of Cydonia” by Muse

"Knights of Cydonia" closes Muse's 2006 album Black Holes and Revelations, and the English trio saved the most gloriously preposterous thing on the record for last. The title points to Cydonia, the stretch of Mars that grabbed the public's imagination because one of its rock formations, in the right light, seemed to show a human face gazing up into space. Matt Bellamy took that bit of space-age folklore and built a galloping sci-fi epic on it.

Bellamy wrote the words and the music, and he's everywhere here: guitar, keyboards and a lead vocal that swoops from choirboy to battle cry. Chris Wolstenholme holds down the bass and piles on backing vocals, Dominic Howard hammers out hoofbeats on drums and percussion, and guest Marco Brioschi blows a trumpet call that sounds like it drifted in from a desert showdown. It's neo-prog with the brakes cut, laser-beam riffs and stacked harmonies charging over the horizon.

Rich Costey co-produced it with the band, recorded it with Claudius Mittendorfer and mixed it, and he never once tells them to tone it down. It went out as the album's third single on Warner Bros. and Helium 3. Plenty of bands in the 2000s tried to make rock feel enormous again; Muse simply aimed it at another planet.

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