Muse

Jesse was in talks with the band throughout their mixing/recording sessions. They discussed themes in the music, culture, politics, etc for years prior to the album’s release. Jesse and the band wanted to go a very different direction from their previous tour, to give this one its own identity. They developed a post-apocalyptic near-future world as a metaphor for our “New Normal”. In the past couple years a pandemic wreaked havoc, an insurrection stormed the capital, anonymous activist hackers attacked governments and corporations, and people began tearing down monuments across the globe. Everyone quickly grew accustomed to wearing masks and proposed a story of an extreme leftist group of vigilantes resetting the world to ground zero; The Great Reset.

Using these themes, the team worked together to create a rig that felt like the skeletal nature of a post apocalyptic, near-future world. The rig consists of grids of the same lights that put the band inside a deconstructed building; simplistic, industrial, and homogeneous. This became the visual identity of the underplay tour in the fall of 2022 and carried through into the arena tour in 2023.

Mirror is a large part of the visual vocabulary of the show. It's placed in the face mask of Will the Hacker - one of the album's characters - and above the stage in the form of large, articulating mirror boxes. The team wanted to keep the air space above the stage clear of trussing, cabling, and moving lights. They placed the lighting rig under the clear, plexiglass stage and utilized the mirrors as bounce points.