[Official Video] Coldplay - Charlie Brown

Raving in a club - perhaps not the first place you'd imagine to find Coldplay. But it's ok, they've got their instruments with them, so all the rock aficionados can breathe easy. But to put it simply, Mylo Xyloto was in many ways Coldplay's pop effort, a full-on embracing of those clean, glacial sounds and immense hooks they've had a knack for turning out over all these years.

And of those tracks, none felt more triumphant or euphoric than Charlie Brown, and it's stunning new video only backs that up. Looking for all the world like a trailer cut from highlights of a gritty Misfits/Kidulthood urban drama, it seems suffused with the way Coldplay's songs are inextricably wound up in the fabric of contemporary culture and society.

When you're the biggest band in the world, you take up the mantle of being a sort of voice-and-eyes of the nation, and Charlie Brown is all that, distilled down to four minutes of soaring, neon-drenched brilliance.

Coldplay - Charlie Brown

Coldplay functioning at their best are good. Really damn good. And that's what Charlie Brown is all about - Coldplay acting up to their status as 'the world's biggest band', as their dramatic X Factor intro tape put it.

And if anything, it was that epic XF Final performance that crystallised what both the band and this song stand for - a rock band that have gone beyond any normal sense of mass popularity to a new division, a higher league of success.

In terms of bands of their generation, what Coldplay have gone on to achieve is pretty much without parallel. And that made the consistency and overall quality of new LP Mylo Xyloto all the more surprising - did a band of their advancing years have any right to make an album *this* good?

Charlie Brown pins everything around that massive, sky-piercing guitar hook - it really is a thing of sheer majesty. When the band released Viva La Vida, they unlocked the floodgates on an angelic sweeping collective of sounds that, while a move away from their former 'traditional' Britpop sounds, played perfectly into their position of the band that everyone (sometimes secretly) loves.

But with Charlie Brown, there is no secrecy needed, for a record this good, all that's required is appreciation. And if there's any moment on Mylo Xyloto that sums up the ecstasy and general sense of good-feeling that Coldplay can conjure up when operating at top-spec, it's Charlie Brown.

Charlie Brown is released on the 10th January.