10 Definitive Rock Albums Of The 2000s

Rock and roll wasn't really meant to stay at the top for much longer after the decade wrapped up. You have to keep innovating to keep the crowds engaged, and all of the retro sounds of bands like Wolfmother and The Sword weren't endearing themselves to people who wanted to hear something new on the radio. Muse may have fit the bill as Radiohead impersonators in the beginning, but Black Holes and Revelations had them operating in a completely different galaxy.

Taking the common tropes that they had inherited from Radiohead, Matthew Bellamy put a strong sense of bombast into every track on here, blending their unique brand of melody with every genre they could think of, like the weird funk sounds of Supermassive Black Hole or the closest thing that they came to a ballad at this point with Starlight, taking the core sounds of U2 and combining it with the theatricality of someone like Queen. They didn't forget how to rock either though, bringing heaviness to synth passages on Map of the Problematique and breaking out the old school rock guitar solos on Knights of Cydonia.

They have never really looked back from this album either, taking the same building blocks here and channeling it into even more different genres like arena rock on The Resistance or electronic rock on The 2nd Law. Muse may wear their influences on their sleeves, but they were not one trick ponies by any stretch. They were exploring sounds that most fans hadn't even uncovered yet.