Hysteria
by Muse
- 184
- BPM
- A minor
- Key
- 8A
- Camelot
- 42
- Danceability
- 0
- Acousticness
"Hysteria" began as a jam during a soundcheck in Doncaster, England. Matt Bellamy played the riff in a blues style, and Chris Wolstenholme moved it to bass and turned it into a "machine-gun-like" pattern of sixteenth notes. He split his signal into three Marshall amps, one clean and two distorted, and blended the result with a synthesizer. Muse then processed it with the sound design system Kyma. Feedback from producer Rich Costey led Bellamy to restructure the song.
Muse recorded it at Air Studios in London in late 2002 and finished it at Livingston Recording Studios, also in London, in early 2003. It came out on December 1, 2003, as the third single from Absolution. Regular play on BBC Radio 1, MTV2 and Kerrang! TV helped bring the album back onto the UK chart in January 2004. The single reached number 17 in the UK and number nine on the US Modern Rock Tracks chart.
Two videos exist. In the European one, played by Justin Theroux, a man obsessively watches videos of a prostitute and trashes a hotel room. The American one shows Muse in front of projected images. MusicRadar ranked the bassline sixth best of all time in 2011, and in 2025 Wolstenholme named it his favorite Muse bassline.
Hysteria runs at 184 BPM, the tempo of fast punk, speed metal and hardcore. In classical terms it sits in presto territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.3 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 326 ms. It is in A minor, Camelot 8A, which shares its notes with C major and mixes cleanly with D minor and E minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.