The second attempt at this comes with the Beyoncé-featuring pop hit Hymn For The Weekend, a free celebration of life and love which stands out for the singers’ beautiful voices and soft sounds more than anything else. It’s catchy, and it blends in well with the rest of the album, but depending on the band’s push may very well be forgotten in the long run.

Everglow follows, and it represent the first shake: it’s a wake-up call, a safe play, but more importantly a beautiful song: not only it manages to shut down the years-long media frenzy about the Chris Martin’s relationship with Gwyneth Paltrow, whose vocals are featured, but reminds us how simplicity is one of Coldplay’s strongest instruments, whenever they feel like it.

It’s a song that could fit well into almost any other album, what fans describe as the “Coldplay-est” track, and I couldn’t disagree. It breaks the pace up intelligently, and gives every old fan something to relate to. It certainly is among the top three of the entire set.

Adventure of a Lifetime is in all honesty really hard to judge, as having consumed it in the past month makes me want to skip it most of the times.

This is not to say that AOAL is a bad track, quite the opposite: it places itself somewhere in between Hymn For The Weekend and Birds, going for the easy listening of the former and the originality and style-pursuing strength of the latter.

It works well, but at this point of the album it becomes a little hard for the listener to focus on what exactly the band has set out to achieve, as sounds overlap a little too much due to the heavy-handed production.

Fun is well placed in this regard: its sound is more genuine, thanks to the acoustic guitar, and Chris’ voice merges beautifully with Tove Lo’s; I am not 100% sold on the lyrics yet, but much like Birds, Fun sounds like an attempt to diversify and surprise. It works great, and while it embodies the spirit of AHFOD less than you would expect, that probably turns out to be nothing but an added strength.

Things start to get a little weird here: Kaleidoscope, which is essentially a reading of Persian poet Rumi’s ‘The Guest House’, albeit beautiful by itself (and meaningful, given the importance that Martin attributes to it for his ‘rebirth’ and the ideas behind AHFOD) does not fit in particularly well musically, and results a tad out of place.

Even more so when Army of One kicks in, immediately afterwards; like Everglow, it sounds like Coldplay playing it safe, which is not a bad decision itself, but the ultimate result is far from the aforementioned ballad’s, which the band has mastered since their early stages, and adds very little to the overall mix. As someone else put it, “it’s just kind of there”.

The weirdness continues with the hidden track X Marks The Spot, which is as forgettable as its presence in the tracklist.

To say it bluntly: it doesn’t make any sense.

I don’t mind Chris’ lower vocals, but the sound is flat and the lyrics are borderline nonsensical. The rest of the band is also nowhere to be found.

I definitely wished they had worked on something else to fill up the time tank.

Amazing Day is the safest bet of them all: a truly ‘old Coldplay’ song, which some people love to death and some other will just like; I am part of the second group, and despite my deepest appreciation for some of the lyrics (“life has a beautiful, crazy design”; “can there be breaks in the chaos of time?”) I am not madly in love with it.

The continuous downhill rolling really hurts the record for me, and creates a notable crack in the flow.

Colour Spectrum is a nice instrumental intro which brings us to what I deem to be the real star of the show, Up&Up.

If Birds showed Coldplay at their boldest, Up&Up represents the band at its best.

This song has absolutely everything in it, from its sound to the lyrics, to the placement as last and, particularly, the amazing, unconventional structure.

I hadn’t listened to such a complex Coldplay song since arguably Viva la Vida, and am so happy to see those ideas finally applied to the ‘second-era’ Coldplay.

Several instruments, voices and styles mix magically in a bombastic, colourful and rich song which fires up (and up!) the band towards the sky like a meteorite, leaving us with two magnificent guitar solos — featuring both Johnny Buckland and Oasis’ guitarist Noel Gallagher — , joyful choruses and the album’s perfect wrap-up in its ending line, ‘believe in love’.