Chris Martin is backstage at Saturday Night Live discussing the Syrian refugee crisis with a group of teenagers. A few feet away, his longtime bandmate Jonny Buckland briefly drowns out the conversation to check his guitar tone, and Martin outstretches an arm to silence him in a somewhat papal display of intraband passive aggression. Buckland mutes his strings; Martin returns to the teens. “You see all these pictures of young people like you—and a bit older people like us—having to leave their countries,” he says, “and everyone calls them ‘refugees’ instead of just people.” So, he explains, Coldplay’s new song “Orphans” is his attempt to communicate how any of us could be in their position, longing to return to our normal existence. Its walloping chorus goes, “I want to know/When I can go/Back and get drunk with my friends.” Tonight when the cameras roll, Martin instructs the teenagers to dance accordingly, with abandon.

And yet, even by poorly mixed SNL standards, the performance falls flat. The song itself is solid: a style of traditional character-driven folk storytelling and pure pop bliss that Martin has aged gracefully into. And his bandmates—guitarist Buckland, bassist Guy Berryman, and drummer Will Champion—remain as emphatic and unobtrusive as ever as they lay out his runway. But the very thing Martin asks from the young dancers doesn’t quite ring true. Somewhere amid their joyful choreography, the pro-forma Coldplay anthem, and the humanitarian crisis that inspired it lies a disconnect: After spending two decades trying to transcend the throes of our humdrum existence, how do Coldplay find their place within it?

It’s the challenge they face on their new double album, Everyday Life. The moody 52-minute vision quest is spread over two distinct halves, titled Sunrise and Sunset, giving the band enough space for an unadorned voice memo and a multi-part epic with a two-minute saxophone solo. Some songs are their softest, most understated compositions since their debut, 2000’s Parachutes, while two others feature contributions from ubiquitous pop formalist Max Martin. There’s a sarcastic, seething folk song about gun violence and a deeply earnest ballad called “Daddy,” sung from the perspective of a neglected child. “It’s all about being human,” Martin said in an early interview about the record. “Every day is great and every day is terrible and every day is a blessing.” Yes it’s a cliche, but he also has tears in his eyes while he says it.

Despite its sprawling architecture, the album is one of the band’s most consistent, unified works. The music is filled with other voices: Nigerian vocalist Tiwa Savage, the late qawwali singer Amjad Sabri, Alice Coltrane, Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison, and three generations of Kutis (Fela, Femi, and Made) are credited in the liner notes. While it can feel cluttered at times, overflowing with annotations and footnotes, it rarely feels heavy; the sequencing seems to inhale and exhale with each song, its attempts at arena peaks (“Church,” “Orphans”) followed by moments of mournful ambience. The dynamics help create a sense of space that’s been missing from nearly everything this band has recorded over the past 10 years.

Each of this decade’s Coldplay albums has been packaged as its own (relative) experiment, a direct reaction to its predecessor: the pop one, the sad one, the happy one. And after 2015’s jubilant but uninspired A Head Full of Dreams, the largely somber tone of Everyday Life feels like its own statement: a stark gray palette that makes abundantly clear what’s absent. Without the ghastly, trend-hopping singles that have weighed down their latest releases, my favorite part of the album is also its most unprocessed portion, halfway through Sunset, where the fragments “Èkó,” “Cry Cry Cry,” and “Old Friends” roll into each other like a medley at rehearsal, something they’re just testing out for potential. The melodies don’t always stick, but the performances highlight just how long it’s been since Coldplay sounded like this: a quiet band in a small room, their characteristic enthusiasm drawn from simply making music together.

These unguarded moments make Martin’s lyrics—a sore spot for this band for as long as they’ve existed—easier to forgive. “Èkó” in particular, with its lapping “Bird Song” rhythm, feels so natural and breezy that you forget the chorus reads, “In Africa, the rivers are perfectly deep and beautifully wide.” More fleshed-out political songs like “Trouble in Town,” where the band’s show-stopping climax is juxtaposed with a disturbing recording of police harassment, and “Guns,” where Martin explodes in a chorus how “everything’s gone fucking crazy,” channel similar feelings of urgency. It’s as if he realized his everyman musings would sound more compelling if they were offered as the in-progress thoughts they are.

Accordingly, when it’s time to sum everything up, he finds himself at a loss. The last two tracks on the record, “Champion of the World” and “Everyday Life,” are its most traditional moments, each its own attempt to deliver a happy ending (and possibly a radio hit). “Champion of the World” finds resolution in a few mixed metaphors—a hard-won boxing match, a majestic bicycle ride, a soaring rocket ship—that all dissolve in a twinkling, singalong refrain. “Everyday Life” is less graceful in its ascent. Martin has admitted that the song itself came to him long after the band settled on the album title, and it does feel a bit like a half-filled template. For all its vague gestures toward what it means to be alive right now (“Everyone hurts, everyone cries,” Martin offers), he actually comes closest to nailing it in the opening line: “What in the world are we going to do?” Even if their answers come up short, it’s refreshing to hear Coldplay searching again, with all the rest of us.

Buy: Rough Trade

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