Coldplay’s new album, “Music of the Spheres,” features 12 songs for a total run time of 47 minutes and 50 seconds. The band wrote the album during quarantine and collaborated with artists BTS, Selena Gomez, We are KING and Jacob Collier. The album generally keeps an upbeat, pop tone, typical of current Coldplay.
The album as a whole is disappointing and lacks polish. At least with previous Coldplay albums like “Ghost Stories,” while they weren’t the best, they still had inspired and original songs like “Magic and A Sky Full of stars.” “Music of the Spheres” seems like it could have been an at least okay album; however, the lack of thought out ideas for songs hampers it to the point where it comes off as stale and uninspired.
The lack of thought behind the album is obvious in how the band named the songs with emojis. Five of the twelve songs in music of the spheres have emojis as their names. While this could have been a unique idea, they never follow through with it completely: as seen in the spotify animations that accompany the songs. The only song that has an animation which matches up with the emoji song title is ♾. The problems don’t stop there for the emoji songs, as one of the most disappointing tracks in the album is ❤️.
❤️starts with an ethereal choir lead. It sucks the listener in, and tricks them into thinking this is a good song. Then, lead singer Chris Martin speaks with reverb… and that’s it. The whole song is just people talking in reverb, calling it singing would be over selling it. This could have been a good song, if the time was taken to actually hammer out some ideas for it and make it worthwhile. Coldplay even did this idea better before in “Ghost Stories’” “Midnight.” The song does the same reverb speech idea, but actually accompanies it with music, apparently a foreign concept to Coldplay in ❤️. Coldplay could have explored these song ideas more, but for whatever reason, they didn’t.
This album hardly feels like Coldplay. Even their collaborations don’t make sense. The only way to tell that “My Universe” is a Coldplay song is Chris Martin singing. It feels more like a K-Pop song that Martin was thrown into than an actual Coldplay song. The only passable songs on the album, “Higher Power” and “Let Somebody Go,” are just okay. They don’t offer anything new or great, they’re just okay.
“Music of the spheres,” is uninspired, and lacks the care required to make it a good album. It’s disappointing to see how Coldplay has declined from the well-crafted and thought out albums of “Parachutes,” “A Rush of Blood to the Head,” and “X&Y.” While their new albums weren’t as good as the original three, they possessed originality and inspired writing that “Music of the Spheres” lacks.
Rating: F
