Coldplay has unveiled a haunting black-and-white music video for chilly new track "Midnight," an atmospheric track absent of the anthemic rock elements of earlier chart-toppers, but overflowing with hints that frontman Chris Martin and company have been spinning Bon Iver records pretty hard as they prep a sixth studio album, their first album since 2011's "Mylo Xyloto," which heard them sprinkle pop electronics over their soaring serenades, but the first teaser from upcoming album No.6 strays much further beyond that. It's subdued, murky, twinkling, but definitely not lead single material on first listen.
The ethereal track's desolate feel and heavy use of vocal overdubs, along with what sounds like a vocoder, feels more Bon Iver or The Knife-like rather than U2 and Radiohead, the group's traditional targets of comparison. A far cry from the anthemic chorus of their most recent track, "Atlas," which doubled as their contribution to the Hunger Games: Catching Fire soundtrack, "Midnight" is one of the group's most understated singles. For five minutes, the British rock band maintains a slow pulse highlighted by shimmering synthesizers that have more in common with downtempo EDM than Coldplay's piano rock. It's the band at their most spacious and ambient, stripped down to a ghostly essence.
What hit us the hardest is Martin's plaintive, thoroughly treated vocals. The frontman's tone has become ubiquitous in modern soft rock, but "Midnight" hears it distorted, with any hint of recognition gently drifting away further into the darkness. Martin intones heavily affected vocals that, at times, resemble early Nineties Peter Gabriel as he sings about darkness, while the synths build throughout the track before a skittery, rave-like keyboard line flits about noisy static. The track closes with Martin asking that a light be left on. Maybe somewhere deep within the effects-heavy murk of his more incoherent lyrics is something that explains just why the song came out at a time local to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia.
The Mary Wigmore-directed atmospheric clip, matches the mood of the tune, is dark and chilly, full of black-and-white photo-negative images and what looks like heat-sensitive silhouettes of Coldplay's members ambling through some sort of parallel universe X-ray forest. Set primarily in a wooded area and shot in negative exposure, the trippy "Midnight" clip follows the band as they dance around to an airy electro-pop arrangement. You also get glimpses of a wandering wolf along with sped-up cityscapes. What Martin and his Auto-Tune will sound like when morning comes and they're out of the woods, we'll have to wait and see. Enjoy its subtle spookiness below.
The ethereal track's desolate feel and heavy use of vocal overdubs, along with what sounds like a vocoder, feels more Bon Iver or The Knife-like rather than U2 and Radiohead, the group's traditional targets of comparison. A far cry from the anthemic chorus of their most recent track, "Atlas," which doubled as their contribution to the Hunger Games: Catching Fire soundtrack, "Midnight" is one of the group's most understated singles. For five minutes, the British rock band maintains a slow pulse highlighted by shimmering synthesizers that have more in common with downtempo EDM than Coldplay's piano rock. It's the band at their most spacious and ambient, stripped down to a ghostly essence.
What hit us the hardest is Martin's plaintive, thoroughly treated vocals. The frontman's tone has become ubiquitous in modern soft rock, but "Midnight" hears it distorted, with any hint of recognition gently drifting away further into the darkness. Martin intones heavily affected vocals that, at times, resemble early Nineties Peter Gabriel as he sings about darkness, while the synths build throughout the track before a skittery, rave-like keyboard line flits about noisy static. The track closes with Martin asking that a light be left on. Maybe somewhere deep within the effects-heavy murk of his more incoherent lyrics is something that explains just why the song came out at a time local to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia.
The Mary Wigmore-directed atmospheric clip, matches the mood of the tune, is dark and chilly, full of black-and-white photo-negative images and what looks like heat-sensitive silhouettes of Coldplay's members ambling through some sort of parallel universe X-ray forest. Set primarily in a wooded area and shot in negative exposure, the trippy "Midnight" clip follows the band as they dance around to an airy electro-pop arrangement. You also get glimpses of a wandering wolf along with sped-up cityscapes. What Martin and his Auto-Tune will sound like when morning comes and they're out of the woods, we'll have to wait and see. Enjoy its subtle spookiness below.
0 comments