Chris Martin Travels the Cosmos and Finds Himself on Coldplay’s ‘Moon Music’

In a latest thread on Reddit that appeared within the run-up to the tenth Coldplay album, a poster requested, “Will new [Coldplay] album be a return to their roots or extra business fluff?” Such a distinction might sound a bit odd contemplating that Coldplay’s early-2000s “roots” concerned sculpting Nineteen Nineties Radiohead and Nineteen Eighties U2 into soft-rock valentines. However the Coldplay purist had a degree. One can think about a fan of “Clocks” or “Yellow” or “The Scientist” feeling a bit adrift amid the shiny elation of the band’s final album, Music of the Spheres, which featured pop ringers like Selena Gomez and BTS, and with the assistance of pop scientist-producer Max Martin, matched among the slickest music Coldplay have made with the cosmically-inclined theme of discovering our shared humanity on the market within the misty blue.

As its title implies, the Coldplay of Moon Music aren’t coming again all the way down to Earth any time quickly. The album is the second a part of their Music of the Spheres undertaking, with track titles like “Jupiter” and “Aeterna.” It’s each bit as intergalactically bold as you’d count on, musically spacious and emotionally boundless. However not like different space-travel rock or pop or soul artists, Chris Martin isn’t lifting off into the Milky Option to escape our fallen world. He’s on the market to search out himself. “As soon as upon a time, I attempted to get myself collectively, be extra just like the sky and welcome each type of climate,” Martin sings on the album-opening title monitor, a widening New Age gyre of celestial orchestrations that ultimately resolves right into a looking, spare piano melody that feels like Elton John doing Erik Satie. “I’m making an attempt to belief within the heavens above, and I’m making an attempt to belief in a world full of affection.”

The remainder of the album is spent discovering out that, sure, Martin can belief in love. “Moon Music” transitions into the glistening electro-pop of the only “Feels Like I’m Falling in Love.” “Looks like I’m fallin’ in love/You’re throwing me a lifeline,” he intones, earlier than his voice lifts off with falsetto cartwheels and Bono-size exaltations — a peak Coldplay second if ever there was one. Admirably, his seek for private solace by no means entails musical complacency. He’s all the time been a sonic vacationer with a coronary heart of gold. Towards the bustling beat and synth-throb of “We Pray,” he’s joined by ace U.Ok. rapper Little Simz and Nigerian Afrobeats titan Burna Boy for an uplifting spotlight capped off by a vocal choir. “Good Emotions,” with one other Nigerian artist, up-and-coming singer Ayra Starr, is a clean, candy slice of Michael Jackson/Maroon 5 feel-goodness on which the 2 artists glide throughout a dance flooring as huge as all creation.

With Max Martin as soon as once more within the function of Chris Martin’s studio co-pilot, the album retains pivoting and swerving, like an area cruiser dodging style asteroids — from joyous acoustic love track “Jupiter,” a few woman so outta sight she shares a reputation with a planet, to “Alien Hits/Alien Radio,” an ambient star bathtub that feels like Brian Eno doing Enya till it oozes its manner right into a hymn-like meditative drift and a pattern of Maya Angelou, to “IAAM,” a classic Coldplay blast of warmhearted bombast by which Martin fjords “a sea of ache” to return out the opposite aspect exclaiming “I’m a mountain!”

Moon Music is simply 10 songs, but it surely’s so much, and that’s the concept — the pop-rock LP as social, psychological, and metaphysical cold-plunge. When Martin swung by the Rolling Stone workplace to preview the album for our workers, he sat on the ground, as if actually grounding himself to absorb the enormity of what he hath wrought.

“One world, just one world,” Martin repeats with utopian dreaminess on the epic seven-minute ballad that closes out the album. Our shared human existence is a bit more advanced than that. However cringe all you need. Martin will all the time proudly be the one dude sitting on the ground who needs to punch by way of the ceiling, stretch previous his personal limits, and attempt to write his huge tacky goals throughout the sky.