Energy. The Beach Boys. Twelve-bar blues. The Eighties. Dizziness. Stockbrokers. Thermodynamics. The Olympianideal. Fred Goodwin. Excess. INXS. Beck's dad. Bellamy's son. Muse didn't set out to make the most gloriously ambitious album of their career. How could they have? The band who dreamt up Supermassive Black Hole, Knights Of Cydonia and the three-part Exogenesis symphony were already well-versed in going One Louder. Any wilder, any further out there, and Muse would risk incineration by a dwarf star of their own making. But you don't become one of the biggest bands on this planet by sitting on your hands. So when Muse approached the making of their sixth studio album, they wouldn't stint on the choirs, strings and horn sections. And be reassured: guitar-shredding, piano-thumping, orchestra-arranging, book-chewing, big-thinking Matt Bellamy, as the band's chief songwriter, didn't lower his sights from The Big Picture nor ignore The Precious Details. And nor were the trio afraid of giving space to a brilliant new element to their sound - songs written and sung by bass player Chris Wolstenholme. But what the Devon-born band of schoolfriends did do different was this: they made things easy for themselves. For the first time since the dawn of their career in smalltown England 18 years ago, all three members were living in the same place during the making of an album. Domiciled in and around London, they block-booked a recording studio - Air - and came and went as they pleased. This time, the only clock Muse had to beat was their own internal band rhythm. They had the days and weeks and space to experiment, explore ideas, rig up massive in-studio PA systems, hire in remixers, play with pedals, and (technical term alert!) fanny around to their hearts' content. It was about saving aggro, and conserving energy. And, appropriately, it was about The 2nd Law: an album titled after and thematically influenced by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which concerns the inevitable wasting of energy within a closed system. As Howard accurately describes it, The 2nd Law brims with "wild" sounds. It's exactly what Muse had in mind when they sat down last October after the completion of the two-year Resistance world tour. Within four quick weeks the trio had 13 tracks in embryonic but viable form.