This marks a minor departure for the band whose last album, Mylo Xyloto, was a pop-rock-opera that came dangerously close to fun. But every Coldplay album is a minor departure these days. Ever since X&Y, which even Coldplay’s die-hards will admit was a sugary turd, the band has lurched from stripped-down rock (Viva La Vida, a toe-tapping triumph of mid-tempo melodies), to twinkling pop on Mylo Xyloto, to this, an electronica meditation on the end of a relationship. You all know which one. Chris Martin’s marriage to Gwyneth Paltrow was evidently suffering as he wrote and recorded the album—“I think of you, I haven’t slept” is the first line and "Maybe one day I'll fly next to you, so fly on” is the last. The couple announced their break-up while the first single—the super-chill “Magic,” which might be my least favorite Coldplay single ever—wound its way through the charts.

But Coldplay's break-up with its uplifting choruses is the most conscious uncoupling on display here. This is a band that knows how to write sad music. Parachutes, its debut album, is one of the most popular downbeat albums in the last few decades, because the songs knew when to come out of the shadows. The choruses of “Yellow,” “Shiver,” and “Everything’s Not Lost” shined a little light into Martin’s mopey bunker, which made the quieter moments of “Sparks” and “Trouble” feel intimately dark rather than merely lugubrious.

On Ghost Stories, however, the band is trying too hard to prove it can get its point across without the all-conquering verse-bridge-chorus formula that made them famous. “Midnight” dabbles in Bon Iveresque auto-tuning, and is fine. “Ink” and "Another’s Arms” match lonely lyrics with mid-tempo pep, and are also fine. “O,” the finale, is two-thirds of a great Coldplay song, but where we’ve been taught to expect a rousing coda, we get an airy outro of angelic synths. There’s nothing wrong with restrained introspection, but coming from Coldplay, it’s a bit like paying to see a famous motivational speaker who’s decided to treat his audience to two hours of meditative chimes—kind of commendable, in the abstract, but rather boring to actually experience.

The penultimate track on the album, the more-or-less humiliating Avicii-produced “Sky Full of Stars,” is perhaps the worst song on the album, a toe-curlingly embarrassing EDM track that deserves no airplay and will probably dominate Top 40 radio for the next month. It’s a simple act of triumphalist pandering, and when I first heard it, I’ll admit my first thought was: “Finally." The rest of the album would have benefitted greatly from a more even redistribution of such indulgence. Without accessibly heartening melodies that plead for our approval, what's the point of Coldplay, in the first place?