Muse Announce New Single ‘Madness,’ Frontman Reveals Album Features His Baby’s Heartbeat

You can be forgiven for thinking that the track ‘Survival’ was selected as the debut single off Muse‘s forthcoming ‘The 2nd Law’ album. It was a common assumption. But while ‘Survival’ was in fact adopted as the official song of the 2012 Olympic Games in London, it never was actually picked as the first single — or in fact, any single — off the album. That honor, in fact, will go to the tune ‘Madness,’ which officially will hit radio Monday (Aug. 20), well ahead of the disc’s Oct. 2 release.

That said, frontman Matt Bellamy seems much more excited about another tune on ’2nd Law.’ Listen closely to the “thump-thump” that you hear on ’Follow Me’ — that sound is the in-utero heartbeat of Bellamy’s infant son, Bingham, which he recorded on an iPhone “just before” his fiance, Kate Hudson, “pushed him out,” he tells Rolling Stone.

Not surprisingly, that’s not the only sonic surprise Muse have in store for fans with ‘The 2nd Law,’ which drops on Oct. 2 here in the States. “There are electro-pop sounds and songs that are obviously classic rock [and] then there are the orchestral things,” Bellamy says of the trio of flavors featured on the disc. “‘The 2nd Law’ would sound like three different bands, if it wasn’t for my voice.”

One thing that stuck out about the overall recording process for Bellamy was traveling from London, where Muse did their main tracking, to Los Angeles, where the band laid down overdubs with arranger David Campbell, who previously worked with metal legends Metallica and his son Beck. ”He understood that film-music thing we were looking for,” says Bellamy, adding that “he found a lot of amazing people” to guest on the album, including a trumpeter who played on Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition.’

From ‘Madness’ to the miracle of birth to Stevie Wonder — it doesn’t get much more awe-inspiring than that!