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Whatever your preference, Coldplay are one of the biggest acts on the planet right now.

Rightly so, too. Their whimsical earworms of frilly love-pop and dopamine inducers have been the face since their tenure way back in 1997. While their direction away from their alt-rock start-ups were not exactly approved by everyone, it cannot be argued that what they’ve gone on to achieve is nothing short of global success – irrespective of what genre the hits fall under. And I’ll fight any lurid Pitchfork reviewer in their dictionary corner that say otherwise.

Not only are they still going after almost thirty years, but they are now hitting double figures in terms of records. Released today, Moon Music is the bands’ tenth record and follows Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres in 2021. Which, along with its BTS collab and Grammy nod – and their well-revered self-sustained tour – was a blazing success.

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Now, following on with the same starry-eyed lovers in a Milky Way, Moon Music aims for the same stratospheric heights. At first, they got it with feelslikeI’mfallinginlove as it was dropped just before the bands’ headline performance at Glastonbury – which managed to amass over 7 million watchers. . Aside from the fact that’s it’s simple, one-dimensional pop, it geared the bands’ next chapter idly traversing space yet again.

Then we had the violin-heavy sermon of PRAY with Little Simz and Burna Boy providing a little pizzazz, which it does, thankfully. With these two pre-singles, it seemed that all had been done ahead of the album drop which was expected in the month of October.

I don’t think anything could’ve been done to increase the anticipation for such a pedestrian album. Now, don’t get me wrong – it’s got some beautiful-sounding trinkets. The introducing efforts of the self-titled is a lovely listen – perhaps only made possible by the dazzling electronics by John Hopkins – while AETERNA sounds something very much like Fred Again may whip up in his shed. Final track ONE WORLD is lush too, with the soaring violins trying its darnest to eradicate the lethargy from a band running out of ideas.

Above all, the record is just made up of wishy-washy anecdotes made only for weedy teenage-love series synopsises. It lacks anything remarkably new or superlative in a world awash with pop love songs. Considering this is an album “abound for the sky”, the lack of imagination here is certainly an irony that is not lost on me. If any good ideas did come up in writing for this album, you can be darn sure they rocketed out the window real quick.

Now I don’t know, it may require more listens – I may not even be the intended audience anymore – but I’m certain Chris’s intentions here were just to squeeze out a tenth and call it a day – irregardless in how it sounded.

While it may not top the lot in Coldplay’s Best Of (if it does, there’ll be some words), it’s a nice round-off to a band taking on the world and seemingly winning.

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