You can find good stuff in every genre. It's not all going to be 'great', but no group is firing on all cylinders 100% of the time.
For the past year or so, I've been checking out "What Makes This Song Great", a podcast by Rick Beato on youtube. He takes tunes apart track by track to show how the different parts work together. Some of the insights he has about tunes that I've listened to all my life are pretty amazing. These days when I really listen to tunes, I listen differently than I ever have, and it frankly amazes me some times that I can hear nuances to songs that I really hadn't paid a lot of attention to before.
There really is a lot of good new music out there, but you really won't find it on a top-40s chart, which is pretty much as it's always been. Rarely are the songs that top charts ever the best stuff the group in question has on an album.
Even the difference between 'noise' and 'music' is fairly subjective. There are gems everywhere if you look for them. I think most stuff has always been a bit simplistic and formulaic, and you sometimes do yourself a disfavor by dismissing everything just because of one song that got radio play.
Speaking directly to the Coldplay reference, Beato has two examples of their songs on his WMTSG list. Though I'm not particularly a Coldplay fan, I pretty much have to agree with a lot of his assessment of the two tracks he examined in detail. Both tracks had some really interesting stuff going on in them if you listen critically.
More than anything else I'm glad that I live in an age where there is so much stuff out there. You have almost an infinite variety of music available to suit your taste and mood of the moment. For someone who loves music as much as I do, it's freaking awesome.
I’ve been binge watching Rick Beato’s videos for the past few months.
Unfortunately it seems YouTube lately is being a little beeotch for striking his videos because he played a few notes from some Cars song.
Which I might add is really strange, because it’s a fact that when Beato features a song in one of his videos, it definitely results in people going and downloading the songs, you would think bands would beg Rick to feature their songs in his videos.