Coldplay - "Music Of The Spheres" (2021)

Coldplay are a particularly over-hated group, with much of their 2000s output being really good pop and rock. There's a reason they're one of the biggest selling artists of the last 20 years, their songs have a universal emotion and earnestness to them. Even their pivot to out and out pop in the 2010s wasn't that bad, with each record sporting at least one or two songs of real quality. However, this latest album, Music Of The Spheres, is everything that haters of pop-era Coldplay make them out to be. Its a bland, genre-less, biteless, insipid record made for the widest, most lowest-common-denominator audience; and sports montages and car adverts. 

All is obvious from the lead single, Higher Power, which is just half-baked knock-off of The Weeknd's Blinding Lights, and that's the best song on the record. It's not the worst Coldplay single (Something Just Like This exists after all), but it's certainly the most homogenised and forgettable. The next track released is the closer, Coloratura, which is such a bait and switch from Higher Power (and the rest of the album as a whole). It is a 10 minute piano-prog space rock song and certainly the 'artiest' on the record, but ultimately is pretty limp and lifeless so doesn't really save the cynical, clinical 30 mins of focus tested pop beforehand.

In between these two tracks are bland, trend chasing songs with the most dumbed down, 'relatable' lyrics and squeaky clean, edgeless instrumentals produced by pop superproducer Max Martin and a whole team of others. There are pointless interludes designed just to pad out the tracklist that have tacky emoji titles. There is nothing interesting or unique or passionate about this record at all, just the band and label cynically trying to keep their relevance as sales juggernauts. HumanKind has stupid lyrics about how everyone is only human and the belief that everyone could just get along if we are all kind to each other, against really tacky sounding 80s pop-rock synths and squeaky clean guitars. Chris Martin's voice sounds terrible on the hook, with the elongated falsetto "huuumaaaan" sounding strained and squeeky. Let Somebody Go is the blandest and most by the numbers break up ballad; and makes soppy ballads like Everglow and True Love from the bands back catalogue seem angsty by comparison. Selena Gomez also adds nothing to the track and has zero chemistry with Chris. It really sounds like she just submitted her vocals over email for the pay check.

My Universe is an equally nothing-y pop song featuring BTS just to cash in on their name and rabid fanbase. It is a bland and forgettable synth pop song with nothing unique about it, and BTS bringing no flare to it whatsoever. 🤍 Is a cringy choral ballad about how "boys don't cry" but lacks any of the simplicity and sincerity that makes The Cure song it cynically cribs from so great. People of The Pride is a trashy pop-rock revolution song that takes the beat from Sam Sparro's Black and Gold and forces it to sound somewhere in-between Muse's Uprising and Depeche Mode's Personal Jesus. The lyrics are tacky and pandering, and lack any angst, let alone anything particularly targeted or meaningful. Biutiful is so truly awful that the name is intentionally misspelled, and is so basic and underwritten it tries to mask it with gimmicky pitch shifted vocals.

The most offensive thing about this record is that it is designed to be so nothing-y and milk toast that it can easily slip into the background, and therefore be played anywhere and everywhere. None of these songs are particularly annoying - they don't have enough character to even be that. If Coldplay weren't capable of so much better, I wouldn't even be bothered to care about this record. It is faceless, lacking in any personality; just a cynical exercise in cashing in on the band's silent majority fanbase. I barely remembered anything about this record in the months since it came out and writing this review, and I will quickly forget everything about it again after I am done.

2/10