Inside Muse’s ‘Drones’ Strike: Matt Bellamy on High-Concept LP
Muse spent the past few years pushing the sonic boundaries of rock & roll, creating increasingly bombastic music that utilized symphonies, choirs, synthesizers and, in the case of 2012’s The 2nd Law, Skrillex-inspired dubstep sounds. But when they began plotting out Drones, their politically-charged seventh album inspired by the expanded use of drone warfare across the globe, the trio decided it was time to radically strip things down. “Our intention was to go back to how we made music in the early stages of our career,” says Muse frontman Matt Bellamy, “when we were more like a standard three-piece rock band with guitar, bass and drums.”
Bellamy says he’s immensely proud of Muse’s last three albums, but things were just getting a little out of hand. “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,” he says. “As I look back at the last three albums, each one had progressively less and less songs that we could play live.”
Muse produced their last two albums themselves, but this time around they decided to bring in an outsider. “We wanted to spend our time in the live room, being performers,” says Bellamy. “So we knew we had to find someone to sit in the control room and handle most of the production side.” Their management team of Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch suggested Robert “Mutt” Lange, best known for producing AC/DC’s Back in Black and Def Leppard’s Hysteria. “Before I met him I wasn’t sure,” Bellamy says. “I didn’t want us to be turned into a kind of Top 40 act.”
The group flew out to Switzerland to meet Lange, who remains one of the most mysterious figures in rock. He almost never grants interviews and has rarely even been photographed. “He’s a very eccentric person, very laid back,” says Bellamy. “He has the air of a person that has not lived in the constraints of normal society or life for a very long time. You feel like you’re in the presence of some sort of guru or spiritual outsider.”
Much to their surprise, Lange was incredibly enthused about the project. “I figured that Mutt Lange would be more focused on, ‘What’s the single? What’s going to be the big hit?,'” the singer says. “He wasn’t like that at all. He was totally into the concept. He is the kind of person to get into the mind of the artist and whatever the artist wants.”