The year is 2006. You’re 13 years old. My Chemical Romance is going triple platinum on your shared family computer. Your political and social awareness is pink and fresh like a newborn baby. You’ve watched An Inconvenient Truth with your parents and are now having confusing climate change nightmares starring Al Gore. You’re learning about the ongoing War on Terror and your parents have trained you on how to handle pushy phone calls from military recruiters looking for your older brother. Puberty has hit you like a freight train. Your hormones are operating at high speed while your prefrontal cortex is still running on dial-up.
Your internal monologue most days includes phrases like, “Is everyone dumb?,” “Nobody understands me!!,” “9/11!!!”
One day, you’re surfing YouTube and stumble across a song called “Knights of Cydonia” by Muse, and you hear “You and I must fight for our rights / You and I must fight to survive / No one's gonna take me alive.”
Who is this band? They're mirroring your teenage angst but also your real concerns about war, government and the planet! You’re also obsessed with space, and this music sounds like it was recorded from the Star Trek Enterprise.
Then there's the bass. Good lord, the bass.
It doesn't just vibrate your tiny computer speakers, it's vibrating the inside of your skull. It's heavy, it's menacing and somehow makes you want to dance.
Naturally, you begin rummaging through every drawer in the house looking for forgotten iTunes gift cards with a few dollars left on them. After pooling your resources, like a tiny venture capitalist, you download the whole album, Black Holes and Revelations, by Muse.
In 2006, Muse was not a new band. They formed in the mid-'90s, and Black Holes and Revelations was their fourth studio album. Their third album, Absolution, topped the UK charts, but Black Holes and Revelations pushed them from a merely successful alternative rock band into a global phenomenon.
The album has many standout tracks, including “Starlight,” now one of the band’s signature songs, and it perfectly encapsulates everything a space-age love song should contain.
"Supermassive Black Hole" introduced slinky grooves, dance rhythms and falsetto vocals, which were not Muse’s norm at the time. The song is a banger that is still relevant today, thanks to the enduring popularity of the Twilight films. In the first film, the Cullens play a hardcore game of baseball set to “Supermassive Black Hole.” Thanks to its use in the film, the song is now synonymous with vampire baseball. Muse even came back for the third Twilight film, writing an original song for the soundtrack.
Then there's the third standout, "Knights of Cydonia," the song that sucked me into the full album in the first place. It fuses Western and space-age sounds, and perfectly captures the album's feelings of defiance and exhilaration. Few songs better capture the essence of Muse. Fewer have aged as well.
Twenty years later, Black Holes and Revelations remains one of the defining rock albums of the early aughts, and firmly cemented Muse’s place in the era’s zeitgeist.
