Will Of The People (Cream Vinyl)

Brand new sealed Album, Limited Edition, Cream Vinyl.

A1		Will Of The People Vocals [Crowd] – Bing Bellamy, Buster Wolstenholme, Caris Wolstenholme, Chris Wolstenholme, Dominic Howard, Elle Bellamy, Ernie Wolstenholme, Indiana Wolstenholme Tolhurst, Matt Bellamy*, Tabitha Wolstenholme Tolhurst, Teddi Wolstenholme
A2		Compliance
A3		Liberation
A4		Won’t Stand Down
A5		Ghosts (How Can I Move On)
B1		You Make Me Feel Like It’s Halloween
B2		Kill Or Be Killed
B3		Verona
B4		Euphoria
B5		We Are Fucking Fucked

The goal of the album, ever since ideas for it arose in late 2019, was that it would explore current events in the world. Since a lot has happened during these years, it, thematically, explores everything from Black Lives Matter protests, to the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns, to the 2021 Capitol riots, and much more.

According to Muse, "Will of the People was created in Los Angeles and London and is influenced by increasing uncertainty and instability in the world. A pandemic, new wars in Europe, massive protests & riots, an attempted insurrection, Western democracy wavering, rising authoritarianism, wildfires and natural disasters and the destabilisation of the global order all informed Will of the People. It has been a worrying and scary time for all of us as the Western empire and the natural world, which we have cradled us for so long are genuinely threatened. This album is a personal navigation through those fears and preparation for what comes next."^[4]

In an interview with Zane Lowe, upon announcing the album, on March 17th, 2022, Bellamy said about it, that the label originally planned them to release a best-of compilation of existing songs (later elaborating on that, saying that a "Best-Of Album" possibility is in their contract^[5]). They instead decided to make a new album, which, musically, encapsulates and recaps the Muse's best work from past albums. As Bellamy said in an interview with a French radio station "RTL 2" in June of 2022, with the release of Origin of Muse and Origin of Symmetry's 20th Anniversary Remix, the band listened to a lot of their old music during the writing and recording process, and were thinking about certain things and ideas that they tried to do in the past, but they didn't work out. As an example, he mentioned Kill or Be Killed; Saying that "2 to 3 times in our career, we've tried to create something that kind of...resembled metal or something, but we couldn't quite go there".^[6] As such, as mentioned by Bellamy on the Zane Lowe interview, the album goes "all the way, from metal, to pop, to my first version of an Adele piano-like song, to electronica", featuring songs like Kill or Be Killed, which is "the best prog metal song they've ever done that could've been on Drones", becoming a fan-favourite after just a few live performances, and We Are Fucking Fucked, which he sees as "the weirdest, darkest lost B-side of Muse's life", while also including songs like Liberation, which is, according to NME, a Queen-like ballad song and Verona, bringing "purity to the nostalgic electronic textures", as described by Warner themselves .^[7]

In the same interview, he mentioned that he let Dom Howard take the lead in terms of decisions on this album, jokingly saying that this is why the album, from start to finish, took so long, saying that Howard took time with the process. On top of that, he added that the album was self-produced by the band themselves,^[8] however it was made with help and assistance from Aleks Von Korff.

Taking in account previous mention of Bellamy's idea of 'era blending' and 'best-of' album, Will of The People presents songs that are reminiscent of their previous albums, Will Of The People harks back to songs like Psycho and Uprising; Compliance seemingly a new feature, presents influences from the 90s with a texture from Simulation Theory; Liberation is a song that could have been released on The Resistance; Won't Stand Down, presents patterns and verses that could have been present on Origin of Symmetry with its metal influence with the strings; Ghosts (How Can I Move On), a song that could be the one that Matt described as an 'Adele type of song'; You Make Me Feel Like It's Halloween, a song that could be released Simulation Theory with its 80's inspired sound ala Rockwell's Somebody's Watching Me; Kill or Be Killed, is intriguing due the mix of influences, ranging from Absolution, and Black Holes and Revelations to Drones with its metal riffs; Verona presents sounds similar the ones from The 2nd Law, like Follow Me and Madness, with its synths and U2 esque patterns and riffs; Euphoria, similar to the songs from Simulation Theory, presents synths straight out of the 70s and 80s, similar to the works of Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder; Finally, the closer, 'We Are Fucking Fucked', presents sounds harking back to Showbiz, Origin of Symmetry and The 2nd Law with a riff similar to Knights of Cydonia.