Wack Wednesday: The Band That Wrote 'Algorithm' Just Lost Its Name to One
Muse spent a quarter-century writing songs about surveillance, control, and technology closing in on the individual -- and this week, an actual AI agent named Muse took the band's own social media handles.
By Song Reviews · September 16, 2026
What Wack Wednesday Is
Every Wednesday, Song Reviews covers what’s strange: novelty tracks, bizarre production, genre combinations that shouldn’t work, internet phenomena, and the growing pile of edge cases pop music keeps generating faster than anyone can classify them. It’s not automatically a bad-music day – that’s Terrible Tuesday’s job. Wack Wednesday is for the songs and stories that are just weird, whether or not they’re any good.
What We’re Talking About Today
Meta officially unveiled its new AI agent on Tuesday, September 9 – a tool built to shop, send emails, and plan trips on a user’s behalf. Its name is Muse. That’s also, unambiguously and for over two decades before this, the name of an English arena-rock trio from Teignmouth, Devon, whose entire artistic identity is built on fearing exactly this kind of technology. The band had already lost its @muse handle on Instagram sometime around June or July, quietly rebranding to @museband; the same appears to be happening on X. Neither Meta nor the band’s camp has said anything on the record about how the transition actually happened – Meta has a documented pattern of absorbing convenient handles when it launches new products (@meta itself came from a motorcycle magazine in 2021, @threads from a clothing boutique in 2023), and this is being read as the same playbook, minus any public acknowledgment either company is doing anything unusual.
We reviewed “Algorithm,” the Simulation Theory opener that imagines “an intelligence, be it human or artificial, that realises that it lives in a simulated reality, and it is controlled by its creator” – read the full review here.
What’s Wack
Muse has spent multiple albums – Origin of Symmetry, Black Holes and Revelations, The 2nd Law, Drones, Simulation Theory – returning to some version of the same anxiety: an unseen system quietly controlling human behavior, whether it’s a government, a surveillance apparatus, or, on the very song this week’s paired review covers, an “intelligence… controlled by its creator.” That’s not a stretch reading imposed after the fact. It’s the band’s most reliably recurring lyrical idea, stated outright by Matt Bellamy himself in describing “Algorithm.”
The wack part isn’t that a tech company took a band’s social handle – that’s happened before, to other acts, for less thematically loaded reasons. It’s that the company doing the taking is Meta, the product doing the taking is literally an AI agent, and the band on the losing end built a career-defining catalog specifically warning about this exact category of thing quietly displacing individual identity. A fan reaction cited in coverage of the story put it about as plainly as it can be put: Muse has “written songs that are heavily inspired by fears and anxieties surrounding technology” – and now an AI product with its name is what shows up when you search for them. Nobody had to write a satire. The story wrote itself, using the band’s own back catalog as the punchline.
Hero image: “Simulation Theory” single cover art, Warner Bros. Records. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.