The Muse model is probably the envy of the music industry: building a loyal following of fans while “still figuring out” your sound, and releasing albums (each bigger than the last) until a steady, safe ubiquity is achieved. There's a reason so many politicians have requested (and been denied) permission to use Muse’s 2009 staple single “Uprising” in campaign appearances and speeches. It's a great song to scream-sing in a crowded arena, sure, but it's also a blank-canvas call to action, one that anarchists, Democrats, and, famously, Glenn Beck have been able to project onto at one point or another. "Rise up and take the power back / It's time that the fat cats had a heart attack," the song goes, before reaching a crescendo of dozens of Bellamy vocal layers all singing in harmony. "They will not force us / They will stop degrading us / They will not control us / We will be victorious." It's not so much a call to arms as it is a call to throw your arms up, go to a gig with your buds, and jump around mindlessly in rhythm to some sick-ass guitar. It is quintessential Muse at their most serious. Or is it? I ask Bellamy at one point: Just how seriously are we to take them?

"I think one of the biggest misconceptions about our band was that we're these serious, moody musicians, you know?” Howard says. “Fucking depressed and shit. So there's always a wink in our songs."

Bellamy's answer is more expansive: "It's a reflection of who we are, who I am when I'm writing these songs. There will be elements of serious anxiety and concern, but also elements of humor and irony. I think that sort of mixture of sincerity and irony, sometimes in the same song, is actually quite modern. There are certain points in songs like ‘Knights of Cydonia’ where you don't quite know whether it's just completely a farcical joke or what. But at the same time, every time we play it live, the crowd, the energy...I wouldn't call it serious, but it's so, so powerful."

Muse is, first and foremost, a band designed to be seen live. As their ambitions have expanded, so too have their set designs, their lighting rigs, the mad professor guitar hybrids Bellamy trots out to create impossible noises in stadiums around the world. Often eager to defer and listen in conversation, Bellamy is insistent when it comes to the intentions behind his music.

"The one context where it never seems ridiculous is in the concerts," he says. “The music we've composed, we've made it with that in mind: the idea of a large number of people coming together to actually celebrate music. And when you write music for that, it's a different sort of format than when you write music for someone driving home from work."

That works just fine for the readily initiated, but as Muse has entrenched itself more deeply in its tongue-in-cheek messaging, so too have its detractors found the Muse experiment increasingly exasperating. "Pitchfork never really liked you guys, did they?" I ask Bellamy, who raises his eyebrows in agreement. Reviewing Black Holes and Revelations, the site wrote, “This is the band's most autopiloted effort yet, a hacked-up last-gen rehash of said space jams, only now with greater emphasis on glitz and glam. Somehow Muse, always loveably lame, have managed to take a turn for the lamer.” Later, the writer posits that their music is based in “three fundamental assumptions: 1) distortion is always better than no distortion; 2) every measure of music should contain at least one drum fill; and 3) the future will be dominated by robots.” All of which most Muse fans would likely enthusiastically agree with.