Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	63/100
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
The Daily Telegraph
Entertainment Weekly	C
The Guardian
Los Angeles Times
NME	7/10
Pitchfork Media	4.5/10
Q
Rolling Stone
Spin	5/10

Drones is the seventh studio album by the English rock band Muse, released on 5 June 2015 in Europe and 8 June in the United Kingdom under Warner Bros. Records and Helium-3. It was recorded between October 2014 and April 2015 at the Warehouse Studio in Vancouver, British Columbia, co-produced by the band and Robert John "Mutt" Lange.

Drones is a concept album following the protagonist's journey from abandonment to indoctrination as a "human drone" and eventual defection. After their previous albums had incorporated orchestral and electronic music, Muse aimed to return to a more straightforward rock sound.

Drones received mixed reviews; many critics praised the instrumentation but criticised the concept and lyrics. It won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Album at the 58th Annual Grammy Awards. Drones debuted at number one in the UK Albums Chart (where it became Muse's fifth consecutive number-one album), the US Billboard 200 chart, and several other countries. It sold over a million copies worldwide in 2015, making it the 19th best-selling album of the year.

On their previous albums The Resistance (2009) and The 2nd Law (2012), Muse incorporated orchestral and electronic music. In December 2013, Muse released a live album and video, Live at Rome Olympic Stadium; songwriter Matt Bellamy said the band wanted the release "to capture some of the extremes of what we've been doing since we want to go in a different direction in the future."

Muse began writing their seventh album soon after the Rome concert. Bellamy stated that the album "should be something that really does strip away the additional things that we've experimented with on the last two albums... I kind of feel like it will be nice to reconnect and remind ourselves of just the basics of who we are." The band felt that the electronic side of their music was becoming too dominant. According to bassist Chris Wolstenholme, "some of the music on [The 2nd Law] was somewhat of a bore to play live, and I’m not too certain how much of it worked for our shows ... The logical step was to strip away all the outer layers and go back to the way we started. Sometimes, making things simpler makes them more powerful."

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