Into The Music
Muse have announced The Wow! Signal Tour, a sprawling North American run set to kick off on July 2 at Summerfest in Milwaukee. The tour is their most ambitious stateside undertaking in years, threading through amphitheaters and outdoor venues across the US and Canada before wrapping up on August 31 at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.
Support on select dates will come from two bands who have absolutely no business being this good at this point in their careers. Bloc Party will join for the July leg, and Portugal. The Man takes over for August. Both choices feel deliberate rather than contractual. Bloc Party in particular have spent the last few years reminding people that their catalog holds up better than most critics gave them credit for at the time, and pairing them with Muse at a summer amphitheater feels like a genuine billing rather than a checkbox.
The Wow! Signal is a reference to the 1977 radio signal detected at the Big Ear telescope, a brief anomalous burst that has never been explained and has lived in the margins of scientific curiosity ever since. For Muse, who have spent their entire career treating science fiction as a legitimate emotional register, naming a tour after one of the most tantalizing unsolved puzzles in the search for extraterrestrial life is on-brand to a degree that borders on self-parody. And yet it works.
The band have always understood that spectacle and substance do not have to cancel each other out. Their live shows are produced at a scale that most acts simply do not attempt, and the amphitheater circuit is where they genuinely thrive. Wembley they can fill. The Gorge they can fill. The Hollywood Bowl, with its sightlines and acoustics and history of great live recordings, feels like a deliberate closing statement on a tour that clearly has ambitions beyond just moving tickets.
Key dates for the North American run include stops at Toronto’s RBC Amphitheatre on July 15, Merriweather Post Pavilion outside DC on July 28, and Atlanta’s Lakewood Amphitheatre on August 12. The full routing covers over 25 cities, making this the band’s most comprehensive tour of the region since the Simulation Theory run in 2019.
No new album has been announced alongside the tour, which is an interesting choice. Muse have historically used touring to support releases, but The Wow! Signal Tour appears to be a standalone undertaking. Whether that means a record announcement is imminent or whether the band is simply trusting their catalog to carry the weight of a summer run is an open question. Given how deep that catalog runs at this point, the confidence is earned.
Tickets go on sale this week. If you have any interest in seeing what a band operating at full production capacity looks like in a setting built for it, the Hollywood Bowl date alone is worth the drive.
