It’s been more than 20 years since “Yellow” introduced the world to Coldplay at their best: hopelessly romantic but not treacly, full of wonder but grounded in the present. The song’s cymbals crash and its lyrics pine for the stars, but it’s more than just some lovesick drivel. Chris Martin’s falsetto can sound mournful, as if the object of his affection has already moved on, while guitarist Jonny Buckland’s distorted chords are slightly sour, hinting at turmoil in the undertow. The “Yellow” video, which was filmed on the day of drummer Will Champion’s mother’s funeral, is similarly poignant. Martin saunters along a drizzly beach, enticing the sun to rise, putting a choirboy spin on the Verve’s misanthropic clip for “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” In the middle of the video, when he raises a sleeve to his left eye, it’s unclear if he’s wiping away an errant raindrop or a tear.
Since then, Coldplay have often invoked the cosmos—the stars, the moon, the planets in general—as they’ve reached for universal feelings while leapfrogging from theaters to arenas to stadiums all around Earth. They’ve also struggled to maintain the mix of paranoia and positivity that fueled their finest work; their last few records lunged from misery to ecstasy without examining what’s in between. These two trends—cosmophilia and a shift away from emotional nuance—hit a strange zenith with their ninth studio album, Music of the Spheres. There’s a loose sci-fi concept involving a distant solar system, and Martin has said he found inspiration in the Cantina Band from the original Star Wars. But the record is more akin to the franchise’s notorious prequels: overblown, cartoonish, seemingly made for 8-year-olds. Even Jar Jar Binks himself might look askance at Coldplay’s latest CGI abomination of a video, featuring dancing alien ducks among other extraterrestrials possibly kidnapped from an off-brand theme park.
Music of the Spheres is produced by Max Martin, who has essentially defined the parameters of pop music over the last quarter-century. After making his name as the go-to hitmaker of the ’90s teen-pop era, creating career-making classics with the likes of Britney and Backstreet, Max has since teamed up with established superstars like Taylor Swift and the Weeknd, helping them attain unfathomable levels of global popularity while maintaining the idiosyncrasies that made fans love them in the first place. For their part, Coldplay have never lacked in world-conquering ambition as they dutifully followed the tide of popular music away from traditional rock sounds across the last decade. So this full-album collaboration makes sense in a numbers-and-figures sort of way, especially following the band’s self-consciously modest 2019 record Everyday Life, their worst-selling LP to date.