Global Superstars Muse Explode in America

Matt Bellamy looks at it this way: "It's a grounding experience," the singer-guitarist- pianist says a few days before his band, the British trio Muse, starts a three-week run opening stadium shows for U2. "It reminds you you're doing well, but not quite as well as them," he adds, laughing, on the phone from his home near Lake Como, in northern Italy.

Actually, Bellamy, 31, is calling from the middle of a maelstrom. A week earlier, on September 13th, Bellamy, drummer Dominic Howard and bassist Chris Wolsten­holme made their Broadway and U.S. television debuts on the same night. Their performance of "Uprising," the pneumatic-metal single from the group's new album, The Resistance — from a gig the band played to a packed house at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York — was shown during MTV's Video Music Awards broadcast.

Read the Rolling Stone review of The Resistance.

Two days later, The Resistance, Muse's fifth studio album, was released. Then, on September 23rd at Giants Stadium, Muse played their first set under U2's gargantuan Claw, aptly hitting the stage with "America," from West Side Story. By then, The Resistance — a whirl of serrated-­guitar rock, classical outbursts and Bellamy's apocalyptic broadsides, fired in a glass-spear falsetto — was Number One in 16 countries, including the U.K., and Number Three in the U.S. The Resistance is surely the only hit album in the world right now with a song — "United States of Eurasia (+ Collateral Damage)" — that includes a vocal homage to Queen, a quote from Frederic Chopin's "Nocturne in E Flat Major" and lyrics inspired by The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, the 1998 book by Carter-administration national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.