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music box: Pop, jazz, and classical.

The Cure for the Common ColdplayThe band's surprising new album.

By Jonah Weiner
Updated Tuesday, June 17, 2008, at 7:18 AM ET

Close listeners will notice something strange about "Violet Hill," the new Coldplay single: It isn't a Coldplay single. That term, after all, implies certain things about the shape a song will take, what it will sound like, what it will achieve. Here, the criteria go unfulfilled. Where's the part where Chris Martin mends a million failing marriages, effects a three-minute moratorium on global suffering, and still finds time to rhyme love with above? Where's the part where a single chiming guitar ennobles the spirit and rights the housing market? At the very least: Where's the damn chorus?

If Martin & Co. inspire expectations of grandeur, it's because they're one of the world's biggest bands, and they relish the role. They've sold 30 million records, they can send EMI stock soaring and plummeting with the flick of a release date, and in a 2005 interview, Martin announced the band's intention to succeed U2 as rock's reigning stadium healers, saving souls via statesmanship (they are prominent advocates for fair trade) and singalongs. Recently, a poll revealed that more Britons prefer to fall asleep to Coldplay than any other performer—James Blunt was No. 2. It was a backhanded distinction that nonetheless crowned Coldplay pop's foremost soother.

"Violet Hill" is a surprising change of direction. It includes disgusted political doomsaying ("When the future's architected by a carnival of idiots on show, you better lie low," Martin snarls), a hammering beat, and a scabrous guitar riff that wouldn't sound out of place in a heavy-metal song. The track signals either an artistic crisis, restlessness, commercial self-sabotage, or a combination of all three—and there's more where that came from. Viva La Vida, Coldplay's fourth album, out Tuesday, is full of grim imagery, songs that meander, others that cut off unexpectedly, wordless interludes, guitar squalls, and one song that the band composed after listening to records by Donna Summer and Limp Bizkit—under hypnosis. "Just to get outside of ourselves," Martin explained to me during an interview last month. In other words: Eight years into their career, Coldplay has made its we-don't-give-a-fuck album.

It's a move many bands have made, including Coldplay's two biggest heroes: Radiohead followed the dramatic guitar vistas of OK Computer with the claustrophobic digitalia of Kid A; U2 followed the sultry Achtung Baby with that weird record where they actually let the Edge sing a song. But Coldplay's curveball is especially unlikely. Bad reviews—most prominently, Jon Pareles' 2005 New York Times takedown, which attacked the triteness of their lyrics and their wound-licking wimpiness—shoved them into abysses of self-doubt. They've talked openly and often about wanting to connect with as many people as possible, meaning their internal GPS has, until now, forbidden any left turns.

Martin put his cornball-populist side front and center on 2000's Parachutes ("We live in a beautiful world," he coos on the opening track). The album was likeable but wispy. It was only on "Yellow," a surprise hit, that Coldplay found its winning formula, harnessing Martin's gorgeous, stuffy-nosed tenor to Jonny Buckland's rocketing electric guitar.

"Yellow" lit the way to Coldplay's one truly great album, 2002's A Rush of Blood to the Head, which captured the band's talent for making songs soar beneath the weight of its own sentimentality. The loveliest of these is a slowly snowballing let's-stay-together jam called "The Scientist": The song begins with a somber, three-chord piano melody, gathering instruments and emotional heft as it rolls wistfully forward. Martin, singing from the perspective of a romantic overthinker in search of simplicity, sticks to an AAAA rhyme scheme and a cadence that suggests a doleful Woody Woodpecker (da-da-da-DA-da, da-da-da-DA-da). Through moments like this, A Rush of Blood to the Head managed to feel grand and intimate at once.

This duality fit, because if Chris Martin is one part Bono, he's three parts emo. He is a needy and insecure man—his songbook a catalog of apologies, questions, desperate promises, and prayers—and it is Coldplay's considerable gift that it can make those qualities not only winning but galvanizing. Of course, it doesn't always work, and on 2005's X&Y, the album that prompted Jon Pareles to call Coldplay "the most insufferable band of the decade," it hardly worked at all. Pareles's designation was overheated—any reaction to Coldplay that's more vitriolic than a groan or a cringe can't help but seem unequal to the offense. But X&Y, the sound of a young band overreaching for significance, is pretty overheated, too. Lousy with whooshing synths and crisscrossed with grand riffs that spiral nowhere, the album offers a lot of busy motion and little to focus on, much less curl up with. Martin's lyrics are no better: The words sun, planet, and space appear repeatedly, cheap shortcuts to the infinite.