As much as pretty well any other band out there, Muse are a love-or-hate proposition. And, touring North America in support of their recently released fourth studio album, Black Holes and Other Revelations, the Brits wouldn't have it any other way.

"There are people who really, really love us and people who for some reason can't stand us," drummer Dominic Howard says of the band's anthemic, quasi-operatic brand of prog rock. "To provoke any kind of reaction like that is great. If people hate us with a passion, at least you're provoking something rather than anyone saying, 'They're all right,' or 'They're OK' or 'They're not bad.' Then it's just nothing - you're not doing anything."

What Muse is understandably less keen on are the endless Radiohead comparisons that have followed them throughout their career, and especially since their breakthrough with 2003's Absolution. But if those comparisons are inevitable given front man Matthew Bellamy's vocal similarities to Thom Yorke, the band manages to put a fairly positive spin on them. "There's only a few forward-thinking bands in the U.K.," says Howard. "You can certainly count them on one hand. And I think we're one of them."

With that attitude, it's small wonder Muse keeps its distance from the Britrock scene. But that, too, is something their drummer takes pride in. "We've always been on the fringe, doing our own thing," he says. "I feel so fortunate that we were never a part of any of those scenes ... chucked into a box with a whole bunch of bands. Because so many of them just fall off."

That said, Muse aren't without their admirers in the British music industry - as evidenced by this month's nomination of Black Holes and Other Revelations for the prestigious Mercury Prize. For a band that took more than a few risks on the new disc, it's a welcome validation of their efforts.

Particularly bold was releasing Supermassive Black Hole - a funky, decidedly un-Muse-like tune in which Bellamy sings in an unfamiliar falsetto - as the lead single. While insisting "it wasn't just shock factor why we did it," Howard acknowledges there was a strategy behind the release. "We kind of wanted to put that out there to kind of show people that we've moved forward or we've been up to different things in the studio," he says.

Moving forward, in large part, seems to have been achieved by moving around. While the rest of the album fits a little more neatly into Muse's catalogue, albeit with even more dramatics than usual, its range of influences - from '80s new wave to southern Italian folk, of all things - reflect a six-month recording process spread out over three different countries.

With stops at a chateau in the south of France, New York and southern Italy, Muse had its most ambitious record to date - a sprawling opus that Howard admits is probably about as "full-on" as they plan to get.

The same goes, apparently, for Muse's notoriously intense shows, generally considered the best way to appreciate the band. "It's kind of getting out of control right now, where the live show is going," Howard says. "It's getting so huge, so intense and full-on.

"When everyone's totally on it and together, it can be quite an impressive thing. But it would be nice to maybe go a bit back to who we were years and years ago."

Based on their increasingly dramatic persona, though, that somehow seems an improbable development. The last thing they'd want to do, after all, is provoke more ambivalent reactions than love and hate.