Into The Music
Muse have announced a massive North American amphitheater run in support of their forthcoming tenth album, The WOW! Signal. The tour, dubbed “The WOW! Signal Tour,” kicks off July 2nd at Summerfest in Milwaukee and wraps August 31st at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. The Temper Trap will join on all dates, while Bloc Party and Portugal. The Man rotate through select stops as well.
Tickets go on sale to the general public April 3rd. Pre-sale access begins March 31st for fans who register on the band’s website.
The WOW! Signal draws its name from a real astronomical event: a 72-second radio burst from deep space that a researcher famously circled with the word “Wow!” on a printout in 1977. Muse being Muse, they found the most theatrical possible conceptual anchor for an album and ran with it. The record drops June 26th, previewed so far by the single “Be With You.”
The tour is a return to form for the band in terms of scale. Muse spent years as one of the few rock acts capable of filling arenas on pure spectacle alone, and this run doubles down on that identity, booking amphitheaters up and down both coasts with a handful of Canadian dates and festival appearances folded in.
The full routing covers a lot of ground: St. Louis, Chicago area, Cincinnati, Detroit, Toronto, Boston, New Jersey, upstate New York, the D.C. area, Charlotte, Atlanta, Dallas, Austin, Denver, Salt Lake City, the Pacific Northwest, and multiple California dates including the Hollywood Bowl finale. It is a proper coast-to-coast campaign, not a greatest-hits victory lap but a full album cycle rolled out with the confidence of a band that still believes in touring as an event.
There is something almost contrarian about Muse in 2026. They have never chased trends. The prog-adjacent, arena-sized drama they traffic in has been declared dead and irrelevant approximately every three years for the past two decades. They keep filling venues anyway. Inviting Bloc Party and Portugal. The Man along is an interesting choice, two acts with overlapping audiences but distinct enough aesthetics that the bill feels curated rather than just functional.
If “Be With You” is any indication, The WOW! Signal is going to be exactly what fans expect and maybe a bit more urgent about it. Whether you find Muse thrilling or overblown probably says more about you than it does about them at this point. Either way, summer amphitheater season now has an anchor.
I’ve never fully warmed to Muse, and it’s specifically this kind of stadium-scale ambition that makes me uneasy. There’s a version of rock grandeur that earns its size through genuine emotional weight, and then there’s a version that’s just production budget. The WOW! Signal is a fascinating title for a tenth album , it either means they genuinely believe they still have something extraordinary to say, or it’s the most expensive overcompensation I’ve ever heard of. I hope it’s the former. Honestly, I do.
Not to be that guy, but can we talk about how ‘tenth album’ used to mean something? Like Wu-Tang’s second record was a cultural document. Muse’s tenth is a concept about radio signals from space, and somehow that’s supposed to fill amphitheaters. I don’t have a specific problem with Muse , Origin of Symmetry genuinely hit different in 2001 , but this whole ‘big rock spectacle for people who want to feel smart’ lane has been on borrowed time for a while and a tour announcement doesn’t change that math.
Every time a Western rock band announces a massive North American amphitheater run, I think about how Afrobeats acts sell out the same venues and it still gets treated as niche news in the same publications. Muse does it and it’s a lead story. Burna Boy fills MSG and it’s a sidebar. I’m not criticising Muse , they’re actually good , but the framing disparity is exhausting and I’m going to keep pointing it out until someone in an editorial meeting hears it.