Afternoon Baseball

That's not out until June, but you can find copies floating around the Internet.
Let's put it this way: The Brits are going to love this song.
There's actually a lot of classic Muse in this song -- heavy bass lines, falsetto vocals, synth effects, and a preposterously pretentious title in "Supermassive Black Hole." From a band that has songs like "Apocalypse Please," "Space Dementia," "Citizen Erased," and "Stockholm Syndrome," however, this is just another addition to their cheeky appeal.

But here's the thing: It's an obvious appeal for commerical success*, from the most basic of song structures, repetitive, almost club-beat riffs, to the perfect clocking-in at 3 minutes, 29 seconds. So, it's likely that it's not that representative of the whole album.
The sound is a little like the Smashing Pumpkins in their electronica phase, only catchier and without the Pumpkins' self-awareness that they were a crippled, dying band without their drummer. It almost conjures up a little of Radiohead (the band they finally broke free of, it seemed, with Absolution) around their "Kid A" phase, but I'll leave that analysis to the Radiohead aficionados, who are surely more in the know. There's similarities to other songs and acts that I can't sort out right now.

The verdict? You have to be pretty damn good to put out something that's quite frankly, pretty generic, although those vocals sound completely legit, which is always part of the live appeal of this band. The album in a month or two will how long until we know the truth, to paraphrase the lyrics.

*For comparison's sake, "Time Is Running Out" was a single-sounding song, but it had counterparts in "Hysteria," "The Small Print" and "Thoughts of a Dying Atheist." Not to mention the running theme of end-of-the-world-making-good-with-yourself-and-your-maker. So it wasn't purely a song to get people to buy the album.