As promised, Muse has delivered their new single "Mercy" along with a lyric video. The song is the fourth to surface ahead of the band's upcoming seventh studio album Drones, the follow-up to 2012's 2nd Law. The song first aired yesterday on Annie Mac's BBC Radio 1 show.
In a press release, the band's frontman Matt Bellamy spoke about the track: "The opening line of 'Mercy'-Help me I've fallen on the inside'-is a reference to the protagonist knowing and recognizing that they have lost something they have lost themselves. This is where they realize they're being overcome by the dark forces that were introduced in 'Psycho.'"
Last week, the band shared photos from the video shoot for "Mercy" that showed Bellamy meeting the director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, Gustavo Dudamel.
The new single, which debuted live earlier this month in New York, follows the previously released "Psycho," "Reapers," and "Dead Inside."
Bellamy spoke to Rolling Stone last month about the band's decision to strip down their sound and write politically charged songs.
"Our intention was to go back to how we made music in the early stages of our career, when we were more like a standard three-piece rock band with guitar, bass and drums," he told them. "We probably spent more time in the control room, fiddling with knobs and synths and computers and drum machines than actually playing together as a band. As I look back at the last three albums, each one had progressively less and less songs that we could play live."
Bellamy told them the album title was inspired by the book Predators: The CIA's Drone War on al Qaeda by Dartmouth professor Brian Glyn Williams. The album also features a speech from John F. Kennedy and makes mention of robots taking over and oppressive government systems.
Drones, which Bellamy called Muse's best album yet, is due out June 8.
