We’re to understand that this is the Chris Martin Divorce Album, and if you really want to go into this thing looking for tabloidy lyrics about what it’s like to break up with Gwyneth Paltrow, that’s all there. But as always, if you’re going into a Coldplay record for the lyrics, you’re doing it wrong. But Ghost Stories also does something much more interesting: it shows how Coldplay can be a vital band in 2014. Over the course of the album, we hear them engage with the xx’s subdued twinkle-pop and with Bon Iver’s sad-robot soul music. We hear them bring in Avicii to produce a track and then forcibly strip away all the blinking neon sunglasses nonsense, leaving only sweep and thump. It’s a canny piece of curation, a beautiful example of music as graphic design, and it shows us what can happen when one of the world’s biggest bands takes a long, hard listen to everything that’s happening around them. –Tom [LISTEN]