When Muse first dropped the album teaser for their forthcoming album, The 2nd Law, its dubstep inflected soundtrack turned more than a few fans scrunched their noses up at what they’re ears were hearing.
Mere hours after the trailer was released on the internet, Muse devotees lit up social media to voice their concerns about the band’s decision to ‘drop the bass’.
“It was sounding bloody brilliant until the dubstep kicked in,” says an NME reader. While another Twitterer wrote, “I’m going to give Muse the benefit of the doubt and say the dubstep is just for the trailer. Give me a song preview already!”
One Facebook user wrote “Muse need to just Skrillax. I hope this isn’t the direction of the whole album. *tugs collar*”
Skrillax? Hardly. In fact, if you’re amongst the dissenters who aren’t digging the new heavy electronica sound, you can thank blame Skrillex.
In an exclusive interview with NME, the arena rock trio state that the dubstep linchpin was a direct influence on the sound of their forthcoming record, drummer Dominic Howard reveals that the banned were inspired to write the track “The 2nd Law: Unsustainable” after attending a Skrillex concert.
“We went to see Skrillex in Camden around October,” reveals Howad. “We went, ‘Fuck, it’s so heavy,’ loved it. I was like a full metal gig, they had circles of death, people were moshing, I hadn’t seen a reaction like that to electronic music before. We took inspiration and came up with ‘The 2nd Law: Unsustainable’.”
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‘…Unsustainable’ is apparently the track we’re hearing at the end of the album trailer, confirms singer/guitar & piano virtuoso Matt Bellamy, adding that:
“Some of that hard dubstep and brostep coming from America, is capturing the imagination. The moshpit has moved from guitars and gone towards the laptop, so with that song we’re trying to see if we can challenge the laptop. We created something that was dubsteppy but we wanted to see if we could do it with real instruments. We wanted to ask, ‘Can rock bands compete with what these guys are doing?’
The 2nd Law is due this September and Bellamy has comforted some by saying that the Skrillex-influenced sound of fax machines humping is the only track on the record that has ‘gone dubstep’.
Speaking to radio presenter Zan Lowe after the worldwide reveal of their official London Olypmics anthem, ‘Survival’ (which wasn’t without its own fan backlash), Bellamy told the BBC radio host, “there’s only one song that’s like that. We’ve obviously tried to do what Rage Against The Machine did with hip hop in the 90s – we’ve taken an influence from the electronic world, dubstep, but try and play it with real instruments.”
The frontman noting that “the rest of the album is very, very diverse… we definitely tried a bunch of new things and that trailer only gives a glimpse of that.”
You can relive the Skrillex-tinged track with The 2nd Law album teaser below, along with the recently released official Olympics Montage for the band’s bombastic anthem, ‘Survival’.
