In a recent thread on Reddit that appeared in the run-up to the 10th Coldplay album, a poster asked, “Will new [Coldplay] album be a return to their roots or more commercial fluff?” Such a distinction might seem a bit odd considering that Coldplay’s early-2000s “roots” involved sculpting 1990s Radiohead and 1980s U2 into soft-rock valentines. But the Coldplay purist had a point. One can imagine a fan of “Clocks” or “Yellow” or “The Scientist” feeling a bit adrift amid the shiny elation of the band’s last album, Music of the Spheres, which featured pop ringers like Selena Gomez and BTS, and with the help of pop scientist-producer Max Martin, matched some of the slickest music Coldplay have made with the cosmically-inclined theme of finding our shared humanity out there in the misty blue.
As its title implies, the Coldplay of Moon Music aren’t coming back down to Earth any time soon. The album is the second part of their Music of the Spheres project, with song titles like “Jupiter” and “Aeterna.” It’s every bit as intergalactically ambitious as you’d expect, musically spacious and emotionally boundless. But unlike other space-travel rock or pop or soul artists, Chris Martin isn’t lifting off into the Milky Way to escape our fallen world. He’s out there to find himself. “Once upon a time, I tried to get myself together, be more like the sky and welcome every kind of weather,” Martin sings on the album-opening title track, a widening New Age gyre of celestial orchestrations that eventually resolves into a searching, spare piano melody that sounds like Elton John doing Erik Satie. “I’m trying to trust in the heavens above, and I’m trying to trust in a world full of love.”
The rest of the album is spent finding out that, yes, Martin can trust in love. “Moon Music” transitions into the glistening electro-pop of the single “Feels Like I’m Falling in Love.” “Feels like I’m fallin’ in love/You’re throwing me a lifeline,” he intones, before his voice lifts off with falsetto cartwheels and Bono-size exaltations — a peak Coldplay moment if ever there was one. Admirably, his search for personal solace never involves musical complacency. He’s always been a sonic tourist with a heart of gold. Against the bustling beat and synth-throb of “We Pray,” he’s joined by ace U.K. rapper Little Simz and Nigerian Afrobeats titan Burna Boy for an uplifting highlight capped off by a vocal choir. “Good Feelings,” with another Nigerian artist, up-and-coming singer Ayra Starr, is a smooth, sweet slice of Michael Jackson/Maroon 5 feel-goodness on which the two artists glide across a dance floor as big as all creation.
With Max Martin once again in the role of Chris Martin’s studio co-pilot, the album keeps pivoting and swerving, like a space cruiser dodging genre asteroids — from joyous acoustic love song “Jupiter,” about a girl so outta sight she shares a name with a planet, to “Alien Hits/Alien Radio,” an ambient star bath that sounds like Brian Eno doing Enya until it oozes its way into a hymn-like meditative drift and a sample of Maya Angelou, to “IAAM,” a vintage Coldplay blast of warmhearted bombast in which Martin fjords “a sea of pain” to come out the other side exclaiming “I am a mountain!”
Moon Music is only 10 songs, but it’s a lot, and that’s the idea — the pop-rock LP as social, psychological, and metaphysical cold-plunge. When Martin swung by the Rolling Stone office to preview the album for our staff, he sat on the floor, as if literally grounding himself to take in the enormity of what he hath wrought.
“One world, only one world,” Martin repeats with utopian dreaminess on the epic seven-minute ballad that closes out the album. Our shared human existence is a little more complex than that. But cringe all you want. Martin will always proudly be the one dude sitting on the floor who wants to punch through the ceiling, stretch past his own limits, and try to write his big cheesy dreams across the sky.