"If you could see it, then you'd understand." That glistening anti-koan punctuates the chorus of Coldplay's skyscraping 2005 single "Speed of Sound", and the lyric's profound meaninglessness has doubled as a mission statement for the mega-band's career thus far. They've established a reputation as mainstream rock's koi pond architects, designing music that's deceptively shallow but, if caught at the right moment, shimmeringly beautiful, to the point that you could focus on it for hours.

Impossibly indulgent on a sonic level while retaining the intellectual depth of a cell phone commercial, Coldplay's catalog is largely experiential—a reflecting pool for the hopes, dreams, and heartaches that listeners wish to apply to the music. This pliability has meant that Coldplay can come off as impersonal, a gaseous giant of anonymity in rock music's solar system; nearly 10 years ago, the stultifyingly dense third album X&Y threatened to swallow the band completely, as Coldplay refined the post-post-punk affectations of 2002's A Rush of Blood to the Head until they were left with an immobile monolith.

On the verge of overreaching, Coldplay doubled down with 2008's Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends, a world-beating document of giddy experimentation and costume-rock bathos that stands as their most thrilling, impressionistic work. Mylo Xyloto followed three years later, which took its predecessor's widescreen template and enlarged it to IMAX-size, indulging in rave-y piano stabs and night-flight flourishes with the color-filled exuberance of a child that can't stop eating crayons.

Mylo Xyloto was further proof that Coldplay are at their best when they embrace their corniest impulses; their sixth album, Ghost Stories, finds them taking a sharp left turn. Preceded by the non-single "Midnight", a watery electro-folk Bon Iver facsimile accompanied with a video reminiscent of an iTunes visualizer, nearly everything about the arrival of Ghost Stories has seemed small: the nine-song tracklist, the spartan, deep-blue angel's-wings cover, the disappointing lack of costumes. The absence of grandiosity signaled to eager fans and sneering bystanders alike that, this time around, something might be a little off.

That something can be traced to Martin's marriage to actress and $600-hand-cream guru Gwyneth Paltrow, which quietly imploded in March of this year. More a separation than an outright divorce, recent court documents revealed that the couple are still living together, and in a 2008 SPIN profile, the only subject that the otherwise affable Martin bristled against discussing was his personal life with Paltrow. As long as the world's known him, Chris Martin has also proved impossible to truly know, so whether his recent familial troubles would seep into his band's latest was anyone's guess.

And yet, Ghost Stories is unmistakably Coldplay's "breakup album," a subdued work that finds Martin and his band crisply moping through mid-tempo soundscapes and fuzzy electronic touches that have the visceral impact of a down comforter tumbling down a flight of stairs. Featuring production from longtime collaborators Daniel Green and Rik Simpson, along with behind-the-boards pro Paul Epworth, drone-techno auteur Jon Hopkins, and Kanye West collaborator Mike Dean, the record is serene and weightless to a fault. Coldplay abandon the musical tourism and extroverted strides of their last few albums and find themselves adrift.

The closest the record comes to a bona fide anthem is the moderately enjoyable "A Sky Full of Stars", a rocket-fueled single on the level of "Clocks" and "Speed of Sound" tainted by Swedish dance producer AVICII's cheap-sounding drum presets and boilerplate synth motifs. "I don't care/ If you tear me apart," Martin wails at the peak of the song's endless chorus, a passionate exclamation that doubles one of the most nakedly personal admissions he's made on record.

Ghost Stories certainly sounds like the product of someone working out their private pain in public; unfortunately, the results are less Blood on the Tracks and more "Can I Borrow a Feeling?". Coldplay's catalog has plenty of examples where Martin's words have failed him, but his diaristic reflections on Ghost Stories are abnormally painful. "Tell me you love me/ If you don't, then lie," he coos on the Spandau Ballet-gone-Disney ballad "True Love"; during the plodding "Another's Arms", he ruminates on lost domestic bliss watching TV with a loved one, "Your body on my body." If the expression of carnal closeness-via-TiVo makes you cringe, imagine how he feels.

"Ink" is the album's most indefensible moment, musically and lyrically, and the song handily snatches the title of Worst Coldplay Song from X&Y's impossibly leaden, fuckin'-magnets stinker "What If". "Got a tattoo/ And the pain's alright," Martin cries while running through a series of love-as-permanence metaphors, over rippling guitar and burbling atmospherics ripped from Phil Collins' Tarzan soundtrack. The last time Coldplay indulged in "rainforest rock," it was Viva La Vida's transcendent, gorgeous "Strawberry Swing", which featured Martin exclaiming beatifically, "It's such a perfect day"; on "Ink", he moves from vine to vine until swinging in solitude at the track's end, exclaiming with a sigh, "All I know is that I love you so/ So much that it hurts."

Fittingly, "Ink" is one of the few tracks on Ghost Stories that leaves a mark, and that's partially due to Martin's lovely-as-ever vocals; when not chronicling his own pain, he occasionally breaks into appealing birdsong, a wordless pitter-patter that marks the chorus of the record's pleasant-enough lead single, "Magic". Otherwise, Ghost Stories is a collection of unmemorable songs from a band that's made enough memories to last a lifetime. Everything sounds pristine—this is a Coldplay album, and instrumentally the band is as exacting as ever—but by the dreary piano-led closer "O", you're left with a series of songs that are fragile, plain, and forgettable.

Conventional wisdom says X&Y is Coldplay's worst album, but amidst that record's shiftless bloat, there were real-deal highlights that hit with blunt impact and have since stood the test of time. Ghost Stories contains no such moments, and thus threatens to rob X&Y of its dubious title. Its intimate nature shares the most kinship with Coldplay's first album, 2000's peerless Parachutes. Twelve years later, that album sounds like the work of a different band, and that's because it is; Coldplay have become one of the biggest acts in the world since their comparatively modest debut, and as a result Ghost Stories' attempts to return to close-mic'd intimacy come across as out-of-touch as Lucille Bluth asking how much a banana costs.

The callback to Parachutes' hushed whispers also means that Ghost Stories is the first time Coldplay has sounded explicitly self-referential. They're a band that's withstood enough comparisons to U2 over the years, and the warmed-over leftovers that have marked Bono and Co.'s last decade as a creative entity are enough to suggest that, if Coldplay continue to head down the path of addressing their own legacy, their best moments are truly behind them.