Coldplay handed the melodies to synthesisers as often as to guitars on their fifth album, and the scale went up with them. Parlophone released it in Japan on 19 October 2011 and in the rest of the world five days later.

Brian Eno worked closely with the band again, picking up from Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends in 2008. His presence shows in the seams: keyboard textures bleed between songs, and the three labels the record carries, alternative rock, electronic rock and pop rock, all apply at once rather than track by track.

This is the arena-scale side of Coldplay: big choruses, bright colours, and a mix built to carry across a field of people rather than to reward headphones in a dark room. Listeners who came in through the piano-led early records will find less of that here. If you liked the direction Viva la Vida took, this follows the same road, and the 2008 album makes a good warm-up for it.