Muse's Matt Bellamy: 'I felt that we could do no wrong. Obviously, we could'

LOS ANGELES — Matt Bellamy wrote Muse's new album in a Santa Monica recording studio painstakingly decorated to resemble the so-called red room from "Twin Peaks."

Crimson curtains, leather armchairs, black-and-white zigzag flooring: The 44-year-old frontman of one of England's biggest rock bands reproduced every detail of the otherworldly chamber from the cult-fave TV show he remembers devouring during Muse's first tour on a bus back in the early 2000s.

"It just sets a certain tone, you know?" he says, looking around the space with obvious pride on a recent afternoon.

Yet as Bellamy sat composing amid a thicket of electric guitars and vintage synths — including an old Roland model he says was the same used for the "Stranger Things" theme — what really inspired him was the tumult unfolding outside the studio, which he observed through an enormous one-way mirror in the building's front wall.

This was mid- to late 2020: Bellamy, who's written for years about the menacing encroachments of technology and government,