Muse have specialized in drama-rock gigantism for more than a decade – long enough to get really good at it. The trio's sixth LP is their most expansive and varied yet, filling out a go-to mix of Queen boom and Radiohead gloom with disco Bowie, Eighties U2, metal, dubstep and enough strings to support a suspension bridge – then wrapping this distinctly English prog-rock crazy quilt around a distinctly English prog-rock theme (something about thermodynamics and economic collapse). When a song that was entrance music at the Olympics ("Survival") barely gets the bronze for Most Epic Thing on Your Record, that's a triumph that would make Freddie Mercury's mustache tingle.

"Wake to see your true emancipation is a fantasy," Matthew Bellamy moans on "Supremacy," a jeremiad against the hubris of modern man that turns Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" into a black-booted march. It's not all collapse and misery: "Madness" blows up the dub-soul minimalism of the xx into a slinky, slow-burn love song complete with Brian May guitar pyro. But the album-ending mini-opera – "The 2nd Law: Unsustainable" and "The 2nd Law: Isolated System" – makes it clear Muse's rehearsal space is fully stocked with bottled water and canned goods. Against orchestral swirls, bass drops and lush Radiohead pantomime, a British scientist direly informs us that "an economy based on endless growth is unsustainable." It's bad news that makes for some fine spectacle.

Listen to The Second Law:

“Karma Chameleon”

Boy George has said this song was about standing by what you believe in. However, at the time, he was involved in a secret affair with Culture Club drummer Jon Moss. "Now people can understand the songs better," he said. "They were written about my relationship with Jon, and they were also written about being a gay man in a homophobic world." The lines "If I listen to your lies, would you say/I'm a man without conviction/I'm a man who doesn't know how to sell a contradiction," described his life at the time, he said. "I was selling this big lie."