Coldplay - Ghost Stories

Featuring "Magic" and "A Sky Full of Stars"

Album download included

Ghost Stories is Coldplay's sixth studio album. Frontman Chris Martin says that Ghost Stories was "42 minutes on an emotional treadmill." The singer said that "although it starts off seeming like a heartbreak record" the album is actually about realisation and acceptance.

Of course Martin should know. The "conscious uncoupling" heard 'round the world earlier this spring was Martin and his wife, actress Gwyneth Paltrow, announcing a marriage separation.

The realisation that Ghost Stories is Coldplay's divorce album might even cause someone hitherto uninterested in the band's oeuvre to feel a certain prickle of interest, writes The Guardian. As they've gone about the business of selling 70 million albums worldwide, one of the most persistent criticisms aimed at them is that, for all its undoubted ability to entice stadium audiences to lift their lighters aloft, Coldplay's music is so fixated on moving vast crowds of people that it doesn't deal in anything other than universally applicable but ultimately hollow generalities: what a recent New York Times review damningly called "sympathetic songs [that] serve as stand-ins for feeling … a clear outline to fill in." Perhaps a dose of public heartbreak might provide some substance.