Drones, the highly anticipated seventh studio album from Muse, is due out on June 8th. The band spoke to Rolling Stone about the album’s origins.
Frontman Matt Bellamy was inspired by the book Predators: The CIA’s Drone War on al Qaeda by professor Brian Glyn Williams. “I was shocked,” he said. “I didn’t know how prolific drone usage has been. I always perceived Obama as an all-around likable guy. But from reading the book, you find out that most mornings he wakes up, has a breakfast and then goes down to the war room and makes what they call ‘kill decisions.’ He makes that decision based on a long chain of intelligence people who, as we all know, can be very unreliable.”
He also explains the trio’s decision to strip things down this time around. “Our intention was to go back to how we made music in the early stages of our career,” says Bellamy, “when we were more like a standard three-piece rock band with guitar, bass and drums.”
“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 continues. “As I look back at the last three albums, each one had progressively less and less songs that we could play live.”