10 Best Album Finales In Rock History

Many Muse fans have grown accustomed to the band's more ambitious side in recent years. After starting their career off as clear students of Radiohead, their delve into space rock themes with a Queen-like level of grandeur put them one notch above your typical stadium rock act. Though these guys were into stadiums long before Black Holes and Revelations, this record gave them a permanent show stopper for the rest of their lives.

Across the record, you have gotten used to the more intergalactic themes like on Starlight and the strange disco-rock of Supermassive Black Hole, but Knights of Cydonia feels like all of those ideas reaching their absolute zenith. Set to a spaghetti western melody, the instrumental could have fit just as well on its own, as Matt Bellamy combines twang guitar with alien-style sound effects.

The real gut punch comes when the final charge begins, when the instruments drop out to expose just the overlayered voices and a stray synth. As the music starts building around it, one of the greatest riffs of Muse's career pops up, having the same type of brashness that would have made a band like Led Zeppelin proud. While Muse's sound was already other-worldly at this stage, this is where the songs start to sound like they're from another galaxy entirely.