Image Credit: Roger Kisby/WireImage.comViva la concept! Coldplay will follow 2008′s Grammy-winning Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends with another album helmed by their own special friend, Roxy Music alum/ambient icon/MGMT inspo Brian Eno—this one, according to frontman Chris Martin, “from the point of view of two people who are a bit lost. Two like-minded outsiders who meet in a very difficult environment and therefore have a journey together.”

“It’s a concept album but it’s supposed to be very personal within a big framework,” Martin told BBC News. “Does that make sense?”

“Brian is the sower of seeds and ideas and experimenting, which is very liberating. Then Markus’s job is to come in after all that’s been done and try and sculpt it into some kind of releasable format,” says Martin. “They’re like a tag team.” (Markus being Vida collaborator Markus Dravs, who also co-produced the recent Arcade Fire and Mumford and Sons records.)

Martin conceded that there had been some false starts: “We spent a year making a lot of noise. You know those things in a fairground where you have bran in a tub and in there are some hidden prizes? That’s sort of where we are at.”

Still, he says, as the songwriting process goes on, his bandmates are his best critics: “I’m so lucky that we have [this] group, in as much as there are a lot of people who don’t like us in the world, but there would be a lot more without this filtering system. Think of the rubbish that doesn’t get out, if you don’t like the stuff that does.”

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