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Muse Gets Conceptual On The 2nd Law

July 26, 2012

Muse

Earlier this month, Muse revealed the tracklisting for their forthcoming album, The 2nd Law, which is due on September 18. The record contains a total of 13 tracks, including the recent single, "Survival." It will also contain two songs - "Save Me" and "Liquid State" - that bassist Chris Wolstenholme wrote about his battle with alcohol addiction. His drinking problem really came to a head when Muse was writing their 2009 album, The Resistance, but Wolstenholme told NME that he has since managed to beat his addiction after sessions with a cognitive behavioral therapist.

Discussing his songs on the new album, Wolstenholme explained, "Both of those lyrics were written at that time when I'd stopped drinking. 'Liquid State' was written about the person you become when you're intoxicated and how the two of them are having this fight inside of you and it tears you apart. 'Save Me' was about having the family, the wife and kids and, despite all that crap that I've put them through, at the end of it you realize they're still there and they're the ones who pulled you through."

Despite those contributions, most of the songs on The 2nd Law are actually conceptual pieces about the earth revolting against its human oppressors, and the subsequent global hysteria that ensues. Frontman Matt Bellamy said that he took inspiration from the second law of thermodynamics, which states that "in all energy exchanges, if no energy enters or leaves the system, the potential energy of the state will always be less than that of the initial state." He said this concept applies to the state of the world in 2012.

"Every time I watched the news when we were making the album, it was endless stuff about the Euro banking crisis. All the news programs seemed to be obsessed with growth," Bellamy said in the NME interview. "There's this paradigm of growth that seems to be accepted, everyone's peddling it, all the politicians, all the corporations, and no one seems to recognize that the planet's just not that big... The second law of thermodynamics is saying that it seems to be gradually decreasing in our bodies, the planet, the sun and so on, but it seems like life, humans or whatever, seem to be going directly against that. So the album is my own internal conflict of celebrating that strength, but also saying 'F**k, where do we go from here?'"

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