Who is “we”?
Harlan Talib Ockey: I pray that someday I’ll be able to score a Coldplay song highly. The generic hype strings make “We Pray” feel like a particularly boring commercial. Or something Hillsong-adjacent, given that the lyrics sound religious, even though this song is about so little I’m not sure they entirely are. The problem with “big idea” songs that try to enumerate everything wrong with the world is that they rarely have room for an actual message. What is “We Pray” trying to say? “I hope literally everything bad gets better soon”? Coldplay does name a few specific things (Virgilio Aguilar Mendez, “Baraye”), but it’s not obvious why Chris Martin connects them here other than the general idea that oppression is bad. Meanwhile, the rest of the lyrics are just vaguely inspirational soup. “Pray that I can lift up, pray my brother is blessed”? What? Elyanna and TINI seem to only be on here for a single line of backing vocals, and Burna Boy is surprisingly scarce too. Little Simz’s verse is as aimless as the rest of the song, and a large chunk of it is verbatim from her feature on Sault’s “Free.” It’s not hard to guess that a song with four featured artists might sound unfocused, but then again, it’s never clear what “We Pray” wanted to tell us in the first place.
[1]
Aaron Bergstrom: Coldplay debuted “We Pray” at Glastonbury, prominently featuring the lyric “pray Virgilio wins,” four months after the state of Florida dismissed all charges against Virgilio Aguilar Mendez. Rare good news from the American judiciary, and you just know Chris Martin believes he somehow deserves some credit for it.
[2]
Nortey Dowuona: Don’t worry, Chris, he did! Song’s cool. Simz’ verse is good.
[6]
Katherine St. Asaph: Equating “my friend will pull through” and “Virgilio [Aguilar Mendez] wins” with “some records to play” as prayers is the kind of megastar musician grandstanding we haven’t seen since Bono.
[2]
Taylor Alatorre: The near-opposite of Flo Rida’s “I Cry,” a song whose fidgety energy and unassuming nature allowed it to wring a skewed kind of poignancy out of the usual nonsense (as well as sneak an Anders Brevik reference onto Top 40 without anyone noticing). “We Pray” is also founded on placeholder lyricism, but it’s far less kinetic than the Flo Rida kind, and the stilted ballroom pace puts the hollowness of its sentiments front and center. Little Simz and Burna Boy are all too capable of blending into the blandness, which doesn’t help Coldplay but does serve as useful advertising for their own crossover services. Instant global village, just add vocalist.
[3]
Will Adams: Not much of note about this piece of inspiro-dreck besides the fact that Coldplay released a few variants of “We Pray” in which either Elyanna or TINI take the second verse. They also released a version where the second verse is left blank for, in the band’s words, “your own inspiration.” I believe this is a cheap ploy to get people to perform unpaid labor in order to improve their bad song. Don’t fall for it!
[3]
Mark Sinker: No one is ever going to say that Chris Martin has an exciting voice — and maybe that’s alway been the point, why not? Just treat the long-gone Eno era as their true template: this sound and this song as nothing but by-the-yard generative ambient backdrop, with some actual throats and tongues and lips dropped in front of it, to be the real element that you remember.
[7]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: All of this mustered effort to create something only moderately more interesting than the median late-period Coldplay single. This aims for planetary benefit show largesse but instead feels like what would happen if Civilization got to commission e-sports jock jams the way League of Legends does — grand global gestures, hollow at their core.
[6]
Ian Mathers: Surely he/they can’t need the money, right? Even the bits where more interesting vocalists are performing, this just feels so hollow and perfunctory. It truly takes all kinds, but from over here it’s hard to imagine anyone felt the white-hot heat of artistic inspiration driving them. More like it’s designed to be minimum viable product to keep the Coldplay name alive and then be forgotten.
[3]
Dave Moore: Credibility: borrowed. Feelings: expressed. Dragons: imagined.
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