HOT FOR COLDPLAY

It's a March afternoon in Los Angeles, and Coldplay has just announced on a local radio station that the band will perform its first live show in a year and a half this evening at the tiny Troubadour, on Sunset Boulevard. Up until now the concert has been a "secret," meaning that only half the city knew about it. The 300 lucky souls who manage to get in the door--a group that will naturally include singer Chris Martin's wife, Gwyneth Paltrow, and, completely unnaturally, Don Johnson--will be the first to hear songs from Coldplay's long-anticipated new CD, "X&Y." But at the moment the band's racing through a sound check, and there are only two people in the audience: Coldplay's publicist, who's tapping out an apology on her BlackBerry to a prominent magazine editor who's irked he didn't know about the gig, and a NEWSWEEK reporter. "Hi," Martin says into the microphone, "thanks to both of you for coming. I don't know if you remember us. We used to be big."

Once "X&Y" arrives on June 7, big is going to seem awfully small. About 60 seconds into the opening track, "Square One," a rush of guitar transforms Coldplay into something that, for all its gifts, it has never been: a thunderous rock-and-roll band. It's a deep, propulsive riff--a far cry from the bewitching melodies that have become Coldplay's stock in trade--and it sets the tone for an album that is, to put it as simply as possible, huge. Martin has never been shy about his belief that he's in "the best band in the world," and "X&Y" is a conscious effort to seize that title by force. "You want to be able to hold your head up high in a room with McCartney and Bono. That's one of the main things that drives me," says the singer, 28. "Are we trying to get to the next level? Yes. We're trying to get to the very highest level. We want to be better than Mozart. That doesn't mean we are, but that's what we're trying for. To me, there's no point in trying for anything less."

Coldplay doesn't have a reputation for mind-blowing live shows--a major flaw in its resume--but the muscular tunes on "X&Y" should take care of that. It is an album of anthems, built to be heard at supersonic volumes in arenas with 20,000 people. And on song after song, it's the guitar that puts the band over the top, turning mid-tempo rockers ("White Shadows," "Talk") into five-alarm blazes and giving heft to the CD's two obviously-about-Gwyneth tracks, "What If" and "Fix You." Both are lovely, but "Fix You," which is slated to be the second single, is the band's most elementally moving song since their breakthrough hit "Yellow." A close reading ("Tears stream/ down your face/when you lose something you can't replace") suggests it may be about the death of Paltrow's father in 2002. Like many of Coldplay's best songs, it skates on the brink of sentimentality with every note but never tips over. At a recent taping of VH1's "Storytellers," Martin called it "probably the most important song we've ever written." He's right. It's Coldplay's "With or Without You."

The only thing missing from "X&Y" is a teensy bit of daring. With the exception of the operatic title track, there's nothing here to match the structural originality of "Politik" from their last CD. Bands like U2 have been able to shed their skin once they've explored a sound for all it could offer; Coldplay is early in its career, but it hasn't hinted at a similar capacity for reinvention. If the band still sounds like this in five years, it won't have the same impact. At the moment, though, Coldplay may be the only rock band on the planet, U2 excepted, capable of galvanizing a broad, multigenerational audience. Evolution can wait.

Martin is indisputably Coldplay's engine, but there are, of course, three other people in the band. A guitarist, a bassist and a drummer--the usual. But it's a safe bet that you don't have the slightest idea what their names are. This is probably true even if you own both of Coldplay's two previous CDs, 2000's "Parachutes" and 2002's "A Rush of Blood to the Head," which have sold a combined 20 million copies worldwide, and even if you've read other articles about the band in which they've been quoted. By name. At least one of the three men--the guitarist--thinks this is just fine.

"Nobody knows the other members of bands," he says an hour after sound check, stretching out his 6-foot-3 frame on a sofa in a cozy suite at L.A.'s Chateau Marmont. "Only the singer. Look at R.E.M. Which one's the guitarist? The only reason I know Peter Buck's name is because of that time he got mad on a plane. The only way I could do it"--and by "it" he means achieving the level of fame enjoyed by Martin, who is so famous that his infant daughter, Apple, is better known than the rest of Coldplay combined--"is by getting into some kind of trouble. It could only be infamy." This is, of course, preposterous. Guitarists, especially, are often just as renowned as the singer. What about Keith Richards? "Massive drug habit." Come on, he's not known only for his drug habit. "But if he didn't have one, would he be as famous?" OK, Jimmy Page? "Witchcraft." The Edge? "Mustache." He laughs. "And how many people know his real name? Dave Evans, or whatever it is?"