Beneath the glistening surface, not a lot resonates on new Coldplay album

Coldplay, Music of the Spheres (Warner Music) ★★★

In May Coldplay announced their single Higher Power by video-calling French astronaut Thomas Pesquet aboard the International Space Station. It was a grandiloquent if fitting destination for the British four-piece, whose music has grown in scale to the point where its exhortations and textures feel like they’re pitched to the entire planet. With its airy uplift, the song offered joyous celebration: “’Cause you’ve got a higher power,” sang frontman Chris Martin. “Got me singing every second, dancing every hour.” Planet earth is blue and there’s always something Coldplay can do.

The band – Martin, bassist Guy Berryman, guitarist Jonny Buckland, and drummer Will Champion – released their breakthrough debut album, Parachutes, in 2000 (it topped the British charts and reached number two in Australia). Their career since has been a fascinating double act: a decade building to being one of the biggest rock bands in the world, then a decade trying to stay there even as rock bands were increasingly sidelined by pop, hip-hop and R&B’s ascendancy. They’re one of the few to thrive.

Coldplay’s calculation is that prominence equates to relevance. They’ve chased it with a wide-eyed ambition that’s made the group a shell that can reformatted as required. Coldplay’s 2015 album, A Head Full of Dreams, was composed in collaboration with Norwegian pop producers Stargate and featured an appearance by Beyonce. In turn, Music of the Spheres was co-written and produced by pop’s leading hit factory, the Swedish maestro Max Martin, who was sculpting hits for Britney Spears when Coldplay was getting started.

Collapsing music’s many genres makes for wonderful creative friction, but in Coldplay’s case it’s made them vast in sound and often impersonal in feel. The synth fanfare that opens Humankind on the new album moves inexorably to a series of rapturous crescendos. Martin frequently sings about the physical sensation associated with emotions such as happiness, rather than the actual feeling. He’s trying to describe something he doesn’t want to fully experience, lest it allows for specificity. Coldplay really is a curious experiment in making the broadest of connections.

There’s an entire interstellar concept to Music of the Spheres involving each of the 12 tracks representing a planet in a fictional galaxy. While that may intrigue James Cameron, the working reality is a pop platform with rock punctuation that can fill a stadium. It’s modular, but when it works it’s vibrant, exemplified by My Universe, a dual language collaboration with South Korean pop titans BTS that is happily unencumbered by doubt. One track, the mid-tempo Biutyful, stands out simply because it’s not panoramic by design.