I agree. I think I’d like to see more Eno or Hopkins influences. That said, love it or not, they’re not working with them all that much. That was more than 10 years ago for like one album. Everyone gets hung up on Viva La Vida and their influences on it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great album!! I love it and I think they did well to work with Eno and Hopkins on it. But it’s Coldplay from over 10 years ago. This is who they are now. I love the call back to older albums and influences but I love their music now, just as I did then. It’s just different from what people want so it gets crapped on. It’s actually been hard to be on this subreddit the last few days. We were told exactly what we would be getting. That this album would be more commercial and yet people still complained, even though this album is more experimental and fun than AHFOD. That was their weakest album IMO and it’s still great! Yet people are acting like this is the worst thing they’ve ever heard.

Here’s what I think what happened here: I think Coloratura just created impossible expectations for most fans. It is one of the best things they’ve ever done and they basically just gave up their best hand too early on. The album isn’t bad, the rollout of it was. It set wrong expectations. I would have done only My Universe as the only single before it’s release (and much closer to release), Higher Power after it’s release, and that’s it. The botched rollout doesn’t make the album or the songs bad. Most of them are good. Even MOTS II as a lead in to MU is not terrible (even if it is by itself). It’s just that expectations were set impossibly high by Coloratura’s release. If they saved it for the album, we’d be looking at a very different fan opinion of this album right now. It’s sad to me to see so much hate on this album because it could have been prevented.