And I think that you could hear that if you listen to the all alternative versions of the songs that are on the album. When we started to work on the songs, the initial versions of the songs were sounding like if they were coming from different places. It’s funny because, you didn’t work on this album as a traditional album but, in the end, there is a strong identity, almost a concept album.Ĭhris: Yeah, I think that there are certain things that anchor the album, visual things and sounds. But we just thought that it would be interesting to try to put more importance on each songs. But indeed, we release the first song of the album early 2017 and the album comes out late 2018. Not necessarily call them singles, because they are not all singles, they are just songs. So, we thought that maybe, people were more able to enjoy songs if we released them individually, instead of a single than an album. We thought that it was a bit of a shame because we were thinking that there was really good stuff on the album that years ago, people would have known and wanted us to play them live. And we modified the setlist and the setlist became more like a best of setlist. You type the name of a bands and you just have to the top tracks. So, we thought about how people are listening to music. And it was not just “Reapers”, it was all of the songs that weren’t singles finally. And people seemed like they didn’t know it. And then we played “Reapers”, which wasn’t the single. And the effect was that when we started to tour “Drones”, the first few shows, we played “Psycho”, which was the single, and people knew it and people went crazy.
That was kind of the first time that we noticed that. But when “Drones” was released, we just noticed that most of the people are just using Spotify. For 15 years, people were still buying CD’s, or buying music on iTunes or downloading illegally music. It seems like you changed your way to make music because how people are listening to music today.Ĭhris: I think that the thing we noticed with “Drones”, when the album was released, is that people music listening’s habits are settled as a pattern. And maybe we’ll do an album in a couple of years, maybe those songs will end up on an album. We just felt like that we’re gonna record some songs and if we’ll like them, we’ll release them. I think that when we started to work on the first two songs, “Dig Down” and “Something Human”, we didn’t know at this time that we’re going to make a record. Why can’t release a song a year before the album comes out? I’m sure people would love to hear a song a year before the album comes out. We were kind of asking ourselves if it was really necessary. Everything you do, and everything you release has to be around an album. People don’t have the time to listen a all record now, they just listen some songs. Because we felt that it’s the way that people are listening to music now. I think we just decided that we’re gonna put more emphasis on songs, rather than on an album. So, we decided that we’re gonna do 2 years of slightly light of touring and that gave us time to go to the studio here and there and just work some pieces. But in the same we didn’t want to completely disappear neither. I think we all needed a little bit of a down time I guess. The “Drones” tour was quite long and we were quite tired. We didn’t really want to go in studio and to make an album in the traditional way to do it. Why did you took so much time before announcing the album?Ĭhris Wolstenholme (bass): After doing “Drones” we decided to record differently than we have record before.
You released two songs before announcing your new record. We spent some times with Chris Wolstenholme, talking about the making of this new album. Right before the release of their new album, “Simulation Theory”, Muse gaves us the chance to talk with them about this whole new record.