“Higher Power” attempts to repurpose the coked-out ’80s sounds of the Weeknd’s Max-produced “Blinding Lights” for a band that once made a pact to fire any member who got into cocaine. “Humankind” leans on a series of hollow millennial whoops, in between plasticine Springsteen chords all gesture, no action. Along with the record’s hackneyed interstellar theme, Spheres’ enormity sadly chimes with what space exploration has become in real life: another meaningless hurdle for the richest of the rich to hop over, a VIP escape hatch. Back then, Chris described Coldplay’s ethos thusly: “We can’t possibly get any bigger, let’s just get better.” The clamorous immensity of Spheres suggests the band’s philosophy has been inverted: Coldplay can’t top what they’ve already done artistically, but maybe they can score several billion more streams anyway.įor about half of the album’s songs, I would not be surprised if the creative process involved repeatedly smashing a red game show buzzer with the word “BIG” written on it. Their first was 2008’s “Viva La Vida,” a song that tactfully expanded what Coldplay could sound like after the creative dead-end of their third LP, 2005’s X&Y. Spheres’ new single, “My Universe,” featuring K-pop kings BTS, who might be the only humans better at scaling the charts than Max right now, debuted at the very top of the Hot 100, scoring Coldplay their second-ever American No. The commercial strategy is already working. 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. 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. 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. Music of the Spheres is produced by Max Martin, who has essentially defined the parameters of pop music over the last quarter-century. 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. But the record is more akin to the franchise’s notorious prequels: overblown, cartoonish, seemingly made for 8-year-olds. 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. These two trends-cosmophilia and a shift away from emotional nuance-hit a strange zenith with their ninth studio album, Music of the Spheres. 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. 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.
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