page_title: Mylo Xyloto
section_title: Style and concept
hierarchical_section_title: Mylo Xyloto / Style and concept
caption_attribution_description: English: Heavily tagged subway car of the NYC subway in 1973.
context_page_description: Mylo Xyloto is the fifth studio album by British rock band Coldplay, released in late October 2011. The band worked closely with producer Brian Eno following their successful collaboration on Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, the band's previous album.
  Mylo Xyloto is a concept album and a thematic rock opera. The album tells the story of a war against sound and colour by a supremacist government, set in the world of Silencia, an Orwellian society. Silencia has been overtaken by a government led by Major Minus, who controls the population through media and propaganda. His aim is to take sound and colour off the streets in hope to draw away "feeders", creatures that use such energy to hunt its prey. The album follows Mylo, a "silencer", a soldier in an army tasked to hunt and track down "sparkers", people who harness light and energy and use it to create sparks, comparable to graffiti in real life. He encounters Xyloto, the sparker most wanted by Major Minus. Through Xyloto, Mylo discovers his sparker abilities and his affiliation with the Car Kids, a major sparker faction founded by Mylo's parents, Aiko and Lela.
context_section_description: Mylo Xyloto is  a concept album, according to Martin, "based on a love story with a happy ending." Two protagonists living in an oppressive, dystopian, urban environment, meet one another through a gang and fall in love. Lyrically, the album is inspired by "old school American graffiti" and "the White Rose Movement." Martin also said that the album was influenced by HBO TV series The Wire.
  Coldplay had stated on several occasions, long before the release, that they wanted the album to be "more acoustic" and "more intimate" than its predecessor, 2008's Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends. The band later said they got to a point where they were trying to make two records, a stripped-down album, that started to be recorded first, along with an electric one that was already being called Mylo Xyloto by the band. However they later decided to combine both albums. Drummer Will Champion explained that the band realized they couldn't focus on more than one thing at once, and songs like "Paradise" couldn't be played in an acoustic style. Martin pointed another song as a reason too: 
  We have a song called Charlie Brown, which was the centrepiece of this other record we started first. We were playing the riff on an accordion and Guy came in one morning and said, 'I'm afraid I have to put my foot down. I don't want to speak out of turn, but I will not allow this song to be played on an accordion – that has to go in with the Mylo bunch'. So then we thought — let's just make one album.
  In the end some songs composed for the acoustic album such as "Us Against the World" and "U.F.O" maintained the "stripped" approach, while others such as "Charlie Brown" changed into a new form. Songs from both records ended up on the final album, worldbeat elements from the predecessor Viva La Vida are present but the overall production of it became electronic influenced. The electro rock sound can be heard through the whole album, beginning with opening song "Hurts Like Heaven" which has synthesised sounds and vocals predominantly on vocoder. The next track, "Paradise", also shows the band stepping outside of their comfort zone and going into the new electronic territory. Additionally, this song has an R&B beat style, which is also featured on "Princess Of China". This track opens with an anxious blend of synths and guitars and then goes into an R&B type beat. The album has three short instrumentals which are included as noodling experimental electronic interjections on the record.
caption: Subway car in New York City. The 1970s graffiti of the city inspired the album.
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