Moon Music" album

Coldplay: floating away from earthly gravity

With their tenth studio album "Moon Music", Coldplay are finally moving into intergalactic spheres.

(Bild: Krone KREATIV/Warner Music, Anna Lee)

As the biggest pop band of our time, you can afford to take a trip into galactic orbit. On their tenth studio album "Moon Music", Coldplay finally unleash themselves from any ordinary accessibility and want to save the world with naivety and bird noises. You can find that cynically evil or hopefully beautiful. Either way, it is different.

In the global music world, there are few things easier to hate than Coldplay. Like no other band, Chris Martin and co. get on the nerves of elitist snobs with their soft pop sounds and an almost infinite variety of colorful live subjects. On the other hand, they break one record after another. Their extensive "Music Of The Spheres" tour, which also made four stops at Vienna's Ernst Happel Stadium this summer, earned the Brits more than a billion euros, and they have announced no fewer than ten (!) concerts at London's Wembley Stadium for 2025, which were of course sold out in no time at all. Not only have they knocked their friend and pop queen Taylor Swift off her throne, they have also sold the equivalent of around 800,000 tickets to men and women with seeming ease.

Emoji as a means of expression
The announcement of the album "Moon Music", which will be released this Friday, divided the pop cosmos for weeks in advance into fans rejoicing in anticipation and prophets of doom trembling desperately towards the release. Whether the truth lies somewhere in the middle is strictly subjective. The openly displayed rainbow cosmos on the album cover and promo pictures even extends to the track list this time. In times of emojis, it is perfectly legitimate to simply title a song "🌈", because the message is more important than the content. What applies to media coverage in times of decreasing attention spans applies even more to Coldplay. If you don't mind buttery-soft lyrics dripping with clichés, "Moon Music" is a loving Valhalla. The "Rainbow Song", which is based on a poem by activist Maya Angelou, still has the strongest lyrical moments.

Over the last few years, Coldplay have become synonymous with the joy of color, peace, equality, love and community made flesh. Not the worst attributes in a world in which rockets are flying at us from all directions, new heat records are set every week for eternity and progress in human rights issues that we take for granted is constantly being set back or eroded. This is precisely what makes Coldplay and their music so special and ambivalent. As the biggest band in the world, and also blessed with an exceptionally social conscience, they have always stood up for the universal and the embracing, but - apart from their climate efforts in tour transportation and live shows - they don't get beyond naive phrase throwing. As much as U2 frontman Bono may annoy the average music fan with his never-ending political polemics, his agonizing presence and perseverance still carry a different weight in the overall social context than Chris Martin's blindingly bright Blendamed grin.

Collection of calendar sayings
In purely musical terms, "Moon Music" is a congruent continuation of "Music In The Spheres", except that the songs drone out of the ether a lot weaker. The single "feelslikeimfallinginlove", which can hardly be surpassed in terms of compositional arbitrariness, slips meaninglessly through the ear canals even on the umpteenth run-through, the hopeful track "We Pray", refined with strong guests such as Little Simz, stumbles due to the generic production of the woefully omnipresent Max Martin and "iAMM" is so designed for the big stadiums that it can't really stand a chance on the turntable or in the Spotify playlist. And then there are the lyrics, wildly thrown together here as examples: "Whether it rains or pours, I'm all yours". "I'll be back on my feet again, 'cos I am a mountain". "All the good good feelings, don't ever let them go". "Never give up, love who you love". This could fill a whole year's supply of calendar sayings for the Facebook generation.

However, you can also take a less cynical view of the openly displayed naivety in sound and lyrics and make yourself happy. That Chris Martin, in his unshakeable belief in the good, is perhaps really a sent savior for the minimal final option of "global peace". That his platitudes are deliberately chosen not to poke fun at the (pseudo-)intellectual caste of critics, but to reach everyone with a meaningful and communal message. By simply addressing even those who are far too often forgotten or secretly ridiculed in artistic cleverness. Coldplay openly embrace the grand gesture in all areas and are therefore more honest, more authentic and more collective than many of those who mindlessly shoot their mouths off about it and are secretly only annoyed that their entire songwriting flair will never reach these spheres of success.

Doubts caused by mistrust
Coldplay's manager Dave Holmes has allegedly negotiated a 35 million pound budget with the record company Parlophone for the realization of this work. Whether the astronomical sum was really needed or not - the Brits, who have long since escaped earthly gravity, are reaching new galaxies. "Moon Music" is exactly the grandiloquent, all-encompassing bombast record that transcends all pop logic, which one had hoped for or feared. The - according to Martin - third-to-last album in Coldplay history ends with the continuous chant "In the end, it's just love" and cozy birdsong. In purely musical terms, the bouncy childhood friends no longer have much to say, but the entire brand has long since gone beyond mere musical craftsmanship. In a complex, brutal and opaque world, Coldplay only want to do us good. It is probably our inherent mistrust that makes us constantly doubt this.