Hear Muse’s Guitar-Heavy Cover of Chvrches’ ‘Lies’
Muse have unveiled a guitar-heavy cover of Chvrches‘ synth-pop track “Lies,” recorded during a recent session for BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge. The band attacks the track with distorted guitars, fuzz bass and propulsive drum fills, as frontman Matt Bellmany adds his trademark melodramatic vibrato. It’s a dynamic reimagining of Chvrches’ original, a highlight from their 2013 debut LP, The Bones of What You Believe.
Muse‘s full Live Lounge session is available to stream below. The 30-minute set also includes three songs (“Psycho,” “Dead Inside,” “Mercy”) from the trio’s latest LP, Drones, along with two older live staples, “Supermassive Black Hole” and “Knights of Cydonia.”
Drones, Muse’s politically charged seventh album, is a conceptual set about drone warfare that Bellamy crafted after reading Brian Glyn Williams’ 2013 book Predators: The CIA’s Drone War on al Qaeda. Working with famed producer Robert “Mutt” Lange, the band aimed to harness the raw energy of their guitar-bass-drums setup, scaling back from the bombastic sprawl of their recent LPs.
“We probably spent more time in the control room, fiddling with knobs and synths and computers and drum machines than actually playing together as a band,” Bellamy told Rolling Stone of their past studio habits. “As I look back at the last three albums, each one had progressively less and less songs that we could play live. . . Our intention [with Drones] was to go back to how we made music in the early stages of our career, when we were more like a standard three-piece rock band.”
Chvrches’ second LP, Every Open Eye, is out September 25th via Glassnote Records. The Scottish trio have promoted the album by releasing several tracks, including “Never Ending Circles” and “Leave a Trace.”