Coldplay to release new song Atlas next week

Coldplay recently took to Twitter to rouse interest in their new song, Atlas, which will be available for download next week. The track isn’t taken off the band’s highly anticipated and as yet unnamed sixth album, but rather the soundtrack for the upcoming sequel to 2012’s box office smash, The Hunger Games.

This marks Chris Martin and co’s first foray into movie soundtracks, a field that often yields decidedly mixed results (though the original Hunger Games gave us Arcade Fire’s excellent haunting ballad Abraham’s Daughter, Twilight: New Moon was responsible for spawning Lupe Fiasco’s bizarre rock/rap hybrid Solar Midnite). While Atlas itself remains to be heard, the lyric sheet posted online by the band may offer us a few clues as to the song’s content.

Although their early output may not have been famed for its lyrical depth (Martin once revealed the inspiration for 2000’s Yellow came from a copy of the Yellow Pages), later albums have seen them draw upon influences as broad as Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, New York graffiti and the White Rose Movement – and for their latest offering the band appear to have turned their attention to Greek mythology. Entitled Atlas, and drawing inspiration from the eponymous Greek god tasked with holding the celestial spheres upon his back, one can almost hear Martin’s falsetto warble on the line “Carry your world, I’ll carry your world”. Someone in the band has obviously done their homework as the song is peppered with references to its movie context, most notably “caught in the fire, say oh” (the film’s full title is, after all, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire).

Self-professed “Coldplayers” will no doubt be taking to message boards in their droves to analyse the meaning behind these words. Whether the song itself lives up to its expansive lyrics remains to be seen.

Edmund Cuthbert

Coldplay’s new song Atlas is released on 26^th August 2013.