“Midnight”—which was just barely barely confirmed as a song from their new album Ghost Stories—is a bit surprising. Built around a composition by current critical fave Jon Hopkins, this mooody electro track takes a few vocal cues from Bon Iver, but the propulsive backbeat which kicks in around the 3:00 mark shows that the band might be hewing closer to modern Radiohead territory than anything else. By keeping things in such a minimal environment, the chords themselves being kept simple and direct, the main melody shifts coming from Martin’s voice, there’s a great sense of drama that can be felt in the song’s skeletal frame. Outside of the earnest ballads, Coldplay was never a band to play with negative space a whole lot, but the fact that they do it in such spectacular fashion is something worth noting. It’s still pop—there’s a definite sense of melody that can be heard in the clicking pianos that chirp and that pulsating, shifting bass pad—but it covers territory occupied more by indie-leaning electronic acts more than the FM radio groups that Coldplay normally rubs shoulders with. Martin’s words are elliptical, talking about things swelling, lighting occurring, and lights being left on.