Music / Drones

1 Following

Drones is the seventh studio album by the English Alternative Rock band Muse, released on 5 June 2015.

It is a Concept Album about a soldier's indoctrination into being a "drone" and the consequences of war. It's musically more rock-oriented, with a focus on guitars, bass and drums, while retaining the arena rock elements from the band's previous albums.

Tracklist:

1. "Dead Inside" (4:22)
2. "[Drill Sergeant]" (0:21)
3. "Psycho" (5:16)
4. "Mercy" (3:51)
5. "Reapers" (5:59)
6. "The Handler" (4:33)
7. "[JFK]" (0:54)
8. "Defector" (4:33)
9. "Revolt" (4:05)
10. "Aftermath" (5:47)
11. "The Globalist" (10:07)
12. "Drones" (2:49)

HERE COME THE TROPES!

• Album Title Drop: Drones appears in the lyrics of many songs throughout the album.
• Animated Music Video: The video for "Aftermath", which was a collaboration with the Japanese director Tekken.
• Apocalypse How: The end of "Drones" is a class 2 or even a 3a. It's explicitly stated 'There's no countries left', and it is most likely only two people are left alive.
• Armies Are Evil: Their track Psycho appears to take this stance.
• Black Eyes of Evil: The woman from the music video for "Dead Inside". And at the end, the man too.
• Cluster F-Bomb: "Psycho" has the line "A fucking psycho" repeated three times in the chorus apparently by a Drill Sergeant Nasty.
• Concept Album: Drones is a concept album about a person who joins the rankings of being a "drone" within warfare and eventually defects. Beware the huge Downer Ending.
  • Matt later on confirmed that the album has two stories: Songs 1-10 follow the story of "Mary", who joins the rankings of being a "drone" within the army after losing her lover. The last two tracks are about a man who follows a similar story like Mary, but it only leads to a Downer Ending.
• Darker and Edgier: The album aims for this, according to Matthew Bellamy, and as one of its storylines ends with almost all of mankind killed by nukes, it certainly shows.
• Design Student's Orgasm: The cover shows a hand operating a person with a joystick head operating a group of people with another joystick.
• Desperately Craves Affection: The narrator of "Dead Inside" appears to be this.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: Psycho's lyric video opens with surreal imagery and a very loud, very abusive drill sergeant hamming it up. It's also from a drill sergeant's point of view.
• Ennio Morricone Pastiche: The opening of "The Globalist".
• Epic Rocking: "The Globalist", clocking out at 10:07, being their single longest song to date.
  • If you take the Title Track as a coda to "The Globalist", both songs would end up totaling 12:56 in length.
• "Everybody Dies" Ending: The entire world is nuked at the end of "The Globalist".
• Fading into the Next Song: Starting from "The Handler" until the end of the album, all tracks fade into the next song: "The Handler" → "[JFK]" → "Defector" → "Revolt" → "Aftermath" → "The Globalist" → "Drones".
• Fanservice: The lyric video for "Dead Inside".
• Iconic Outfit: Throughout the Drones tour the band would perform in all-black flight suits (sometimes with red accents), loosely inspired by the uniforms of military drone pilots.
• I'm Not Afraid of You: "The Handler" is about the protagonist breaking free from the title character's control.
• Last Note Nightmare: "Reapers" ends with an absolute shriek of "HERE COME THE DRONES!" Several times over.
• Lyrical Dissonance: "Mercy" has a similar sound to "Starlight", and it is about someone trying, and presumably failing, to escape mind control.
• Metal Scream: "Psycho":
  I'm gonna make you! I'm gonna break you! I'm gonna make you! A FUCKING PSYCHO!
• Miniscule Rocking: "[Drill Sergeant]" (0:21) and "[JFK]" (0:54).
• Musical Nod:
  • "The Globalist" features both the Adagio in G minor^note frequently attributed to Tomaso Albinoni, but composed by Remo Giazotto, and Variation IX ("Nimrod") from Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations.
  • The title track's melody is built around Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli.
• My God, What Have I Done?? : The ending of "The Globalist."
• Non-Appearing Title: "Aftermath" and "The Globalist"
• One-Word Title: "Psycho" and "Drones".
• Out-of-Genre Experience: The title track of Drones is an a capella Gregorian chant.
• Playing with Puppets: The music video and stage visuals for "The Handler" feature faceless hands controlling marionettes.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: The chorus of "Defector":

  I'M-A-DE-FEC-TOR!

• Revisiting the Roots: This album was an attempt to revisit the more anthemic rock sound of the band's earlier albums.
• Robot Girl: The focus of the music video for "Mercy". She's also being used as a Sexbot.
• Sdrawkcab Speech: A blink-and-you'll-miss-it instance in "The Globalist", with sped-up backmasked excerpts of previous songs in the album thus far.
• Self-Backing Vocalist: Taken to its logical extreme in the title track, which features Matt as a one-man madrigal choir.
• Shout-Out: One scene in the official lyrics video for the song "Mercy" (about a person feeling disillusioned with the totalitarian system where they work) shows a few masks. One is a Guy Fawkes mask.
• Title Track
• Turned Against Their Masters: The woman in the "Mercy" music video.
• Villain Song:
  • "Psycho" is sung from the perspective of a Drill Sergeant Nasty (complete with drill sergeant samples) who wants to turn to person he is talking to into a mindless soldier.
  • "The Globalist" is about a man rising through the ranks of a corrupt system until he controls it, and using that control to destroy the world in a nuclear holocaust. The final verse has him finally realize what a monster he's become.
• War Is Hell: Basically the premise of the whole album.

There's no culture left
To love and cherish
It's gone, you know it's gone for good
A trillion memories
Lost in space and time forevermore
I just wanted
I just needed to be loved