A few years ago, Busta Rhymes was pop’s most consistent prophet of apocalypse, but now that baton has passed to three young Brits whose heads are bloated by Rachmaninov, Queen and Zardoz. Their last record, 2003’s Absolution, featured songs called “Apocalypse Please” and “Time Is Running Out,” and their astonishing fourth album opens with frontman Matt Bellamy squalling, “You will burn in hell for your sins/You must pay for your crimes against the earth,” over a killer-robot electro throb. In Muse’s worldview, if environmental meltdown doesn’t get you, then aliens will.

Muse are a progressive-rock band who force themselves to write pop songs, and Black Holes strikes the motherlode. Like a questing 1970s double disc compacted into 45 brutally efficient minutes, it has the momentum of a meteor. To take one three-song run, “Starlight” is an intergalactic love song that suggests U2 wearing jetpacks; “Supermassive Black Hole” is the falsetto disco-metal floor-shaker you’d get if Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” was rebuilt by the Scissor Sisters; and “Map of the Problematique” (Muse’s titles are always a flamboyant joy) is Depeche Mode taking orders from Darth Vader. The closing troika is the soundtrack for a sci-fi spaghetti western, gunning for the stars with flamenco guitar, mariachi horns and laser-beam keyboard solos.

Like the Darkness, Muse are Queen fans who always say yes to another excess, but they do it with a poker face. For all its absurdity (the six-minute finale glories in the name “Knights of Cydonia”), Black Holes is fueled by innocent joy, bulletproof self-belief and, for the first time in their career, heroic optimism. The message of “Assassin,” which calls for the planet’s Travis Bickles to rise up and dispatch the “demonocracy,” and the space-rock power ballad “Invincible” is that Armageddon might be averted if the right people make a stand. It’s a protest record in cosmic clothing.

Download: “Starlight,” “Invincible,” “Supermassive Black Hole”