Origin Of Symmetry (XX Anniversary)

By the time Origin of Symmetry arrived on 18 June 2001, Muse had already been tagged as Radiohead disciples. This record blows that idea to pieces. Their second album is where the band truly come into focus, a breakthrough that fuses alternative rock, progressive excess, space rock theatrics and hard rock muscle into something grandiose, volatile and oddly precise. It is an album that treats distortion pedals, falsetto and classical motifs with equal seriousness, and refuses to apologise for the scale of its ambition.

Written largely on the road after Showbiz, Origin of Symmetry feels like the sound of a touring band tightening its screws and then firing itself into orbit. Tracks such as New Born, Bliss, Plug In Baby and Darkshines were first captured with David Bottrill, recorded live in the studio to preserve their onstage intensity, then finished with John Leckie across a run of British studios, from Cornwall to David Gilmour’s Astoria houseboat on the Thames. Matt Bellamy switched from his Gibson Les Paul to a custom Manson guitar loaded with a built-in Fuzz Factory, which becomes a kind of extra voice throughout the record. When the band wanted a church organ for Megalomania, they simply went to a church in Bath and recorded one. The cover of Feeling Good nods to Broadway and Nina Simone, yet even that standard is folded into Muse’s widescreen vocabulary.

Lyrically, Bellamy moves away from the heartbroken angst of Showbiz and leans into sci fi surrealism and big cosmic questions. The title itself is taken from Michio Kaku’s book Hyperspace, inspired by the idea of a future work called The Origin of Symmetry, a play on On the Origin of Species. Bellamy imagines a universe where stability, symmetry and the existence of God are all up for interrogation, and the music mirrors that obsession with extremes, veering between delicate piano passages and towering, fuzz drenched riffs.

On release, the album reached number three in the UK and went platinum, yielding four singles in Plug In Baby, New Born, Bliss and Hyper Music / Feeling Good. It was Muse’s first record to chart in the United States, despite a delayed American release after their label demanded less falsetto and the band simply walked away. Critics mostly embraced the scale of what they had done. Q hailed it as an “astonishing record” where extra terrestrial fascinations collide with unhinged classical impulses, while NME heard a reinvention of grunge as neo classical, high gothic future rock. Not everyone was convinced, some found it overwrought or “overplayed”, but the dominant story has been one of growing respect.

Two decades on, Origin of Symmetry feels like the moment Muse stopped being a promising rock band and became their own strange, theatrical ecosystem. Its influence has only solidified, picking up repeated acclaim in greatest album lists and inspiring full album shows at Reading and Leeds for its tenth anniversary. The 20th anniversary XX Anniversary RemiXX, remixed and remastered with Rich Costey, opens the sound up further and restores buried strings and harpsichord details, confirming what many fans already believed. This is the definitive Muse statement of their early years, colossal, unapologetic and still thrillingly out of proportion.