After unveiling it gradually as a recent online treasure hunt for fans, Muse have officially released the old-school single ‘Hexagons’. Check it out below.
The track is the latest to be released from the band’s 10th album, ‘The Wow! Signal’, following on from last year’s ‘Unravelling‘, the epic ‘Be With You’, and apocalyptic ‘Cryogen’.
While Matt Bellamy and co. have only just dropped the latest teaser of the record, some may have heard it already as the band launched an online treasure hunt for fans over the weekend – hiding fragments of the song across the internet, waiting to be discovered.
Unique codes were hidden in billboards across Sydney, New York, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Paris and London – and when put together, each fragment spelled out the full version of the song.
In ‘Hexagons’, Muse venture back to the sound of their earlier discography, leaning into otherworldly, intricate, electronic instrumentals – similar to 2001’s ‘Origin Of Symmetry’ – and pairing it with ethereal falsetto vocals and theatrical elements, like seen in 2006’s ‘Black Holes And Revelations’.
“I’m a marionette with severed strings/ Gorge on my soul while I’m weak and dying,” Bellamy sings softly in the opening verse, following an epic, intense instrumental section that opens the track.
It builds up and drops down again before the chorus, with the singer leaning into captivating falsettos and the band around him gradually gaining momentum. “Our resistance is mass-produced/ And she will ghost write my obsessions,” he sings. “Reach out, touch me/ And draw me from the sixth dimension/ You have been forcing my hand.”
The song aligns with the theme of the record as a whole, which is set to capture “a mix of cosmic mystery, existential hope, and the exhilarating possibility of contact with something far greater than ourselves”.
The title of the album comes inspired by one of the most compelling interstellar mysteries of the last century – a powerful 72-second radio burst detected in 1977, which originated from the constellation Sagittarius. Its bandwidth and intensity suggested a possible extraterrestrial source.
When the anomaly was first discovered, the astronomer famously circled the sequence ‘6EQUJ5’ and wrote ‘WOW!’ on the printout beside it – giving the signal its name.
‘The Wow! Signal’ will drop on June 26, and is available for pre-order here.
Muse have also announced a 2026 North American arena tour with Bloc Party, The Temper Trap and Portugal. The Man. UK and European dates are expected to be announced shortly, following Bellamy teasing at a recent London gig that the band would “be back in November”.
The band last played in Europe last summer, where they stepped in for Kings Of Leon to play a a headline set at Madrid’s Mad Cool Festival. NME praised that show as an “era-spanning, revolutionary space-tacular” with “Matt Bellamy and co easing into their new cycle with riffs and revolution”.
