Everyday Life
If the kaleidoscopic joy of 2015’s *A Head Full of Dreams* feels like a distant memory now, that’s natural—it was a different time. In the four years since we last heard from Coldplay, the world has grown more chaotic. “Not that there hasn’t always been craziness,” frontman Chris Martin tells Apple Music, “but it’s so in-your-face all the time. It can only make you feel like—it doesn’t matter the consequence, you have to sing what’s coming through.” In response comes *Everyday Life*, a double album that finds arguably this century’s biggest and most agreeable rock band attempting to inspire unity, at considerable cost and risk. “It’s very true to us,” Martin says. “That’s all I know.” They’ve organized the album conceptually. The first half, Sunrise, opens with strings both somber and hopeful. “It’s the challenges we see happening in our lives and in lots of other people’s lives,” Martin explains. The second, Sunset, is “a bit more, ‘How might you meet those challenges? How can one go on?’” That side kicks off with “Guns,” an acoustic number in which Martin references Dylan and skewers American gun violence, deadpanning, “Melt down all the trumpets, all the trombones and the drums/Who needs education or a thousand splendid suns?” It’s the most urgent and overtly political they’ve sounded since 2002’s “Politik,” which was recorded in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Unlike their most recent output, *Everyday Life* is similarly raw, interspersed with snippets of ambient sound that lend the album familiar texture: street noise, birdsong, a tense exchange between motorist and police officer. When Martin takes to his piano and sings alongside a gospel chorus in “BrokEn,” you feel like you’re sitting in church a few feet away from them. While much of the record errs on the side of understatement, there are anthems and grand gestures as well. On “Arabesque,” the entire band joins forces with Femi Kuti’s Positive Force for a feverish Afrobeat groove that, in addition to a verse in French, features the central refrain: “We share the same blood.” That message rings throughout *Everyday Life*, from the open-armed, choir-led embrace of “Orphans”—where Guy Berryman’s bassline sets a new gold standard for buoyancy—to the spoken-word immediacy of “بنی آدم” to the twilight skywriting of closing duo “Champion of the World” and the title track. “Everyone hurts, everyone cries, everyone tells each other all kinds of lies,” Martin sings on the latter. “Everyone falls, everybody dreams and doubts/Got to keep dancing when the lights go out.”
On the 52-minute vision quest that is their new double LP, the world’s most earnest arena band sound looser than they have in years.
Everyday Life is, like everyday life, kind of a mess—a jumble of ideas and aspirations and successes and failures. In that way, it might be the most human thing Coldplay has ever done.
On an expansive, emotional, epic gauntlet, Coldplay are a far cry from the band who rang in this decade, and they’re all the better for it.
They had their spell of trying to be U2, but these days Coldplay might be the rock equivalent of Madonna, entering middle age while keeping up with the kids by constantly absorbing newer styles into their familiar melodic world. In the past that’s meant collaborations with Beyoncé and Rihanna, The Chainsmokers and Avicii.
Coldplay, easy-listening rock kings, deepen their politics and globe-trotting sound on a downright compelling LP.
Tackling gun control and police brutality, Coldplay’s eighth album is a valiant, if flawed, attempt to break from tradition
Capping their record-breaking A Head Full of Dreams era in 2018, Coldplay cemented themselves as one of the biggest international acts of the decade.
No matter how blatant Coldplay get with their pop pandering, their sense of self-importance remains undiminished. Their most recent single w...
Coldplay knew what they were doing by releasing at the same time the first two singles, "Orphans" and "Arabesque," ahead of their eighth studio album, Everyday Life.
Listening to the swirling ambience of 'Everyday Life's orchestral, lyric-less two-minute opening track, a listener would never know that a
The band’s new double album mixes more of their melodically watertight stadium pop with dabblings in the genres they are least suited to dabble in
Coldplay - Everyday Life review: It may not be much of a double concept album, but Everyday Life is still the best Coldplay has sounded in over a decade.
Singing with gentle sorrow about repression, conflict and racism on the mellifluous Trouble in Town, Coldplay frontman Chris Martin interrupts his litany of despair to softly proclaim:
The band play it safe with this patchy, inconsistent soundtrack to everyday life
For all they've inspired swathes of the most crushingly mundane music of the modern age from Sheeran on down, Coldplay have always been at their best at their most grandiose. That is, when they shake off Chris Martin's I'm-a-normal-bloke schtick and let their romanticism – in melodies, arrangements and fairytale lyrics – fly free. So it sounded promising when it emerged they were releasing a double album full of global influences: maybe they're really going to go for it this time?