Coldplay, Ranked
If I’ve clocked up 10,000 hours doing anything over the course of my life, it would be listening to this band. Whether that has been a worthwhile endeavour remains to be seen; the 4,500 words expelled in this piece are the closest I have come to justifying it. I might not say much more about Coldplay for a while, after this. If you want to know how I feel about the band I’ve moved through life with longer than any other, it’s in here. I don’t expect the two albums to come are going to change my assessment very much.
I was there, in 2016, when they brought Warnie on stage and he played the harmonica, when Chris Martin played ‘Swallowed in the Sea’ solo and forgot the words, when they played ‘Birds’. I was not there, last week, when they dedicated ‘Yellow’ to Warnie, who is no longer with us, when they played two songs with emojis for titles, when they played ‘Something Just Like This’. I was there, in a way, in 2008, when they added words to ‘Life in Technicolor’ and Jay-Z to ‘Lost!’. I was there, in 2009, when ‘Christmas Lights’ came out on my birthday at around 7pm, and I remember not being able to get to sleep that night. I was there, in 2021, when ‘Higher Power’ was released, but I don’t remember the day I heard it.
Coldplay are the only band I’ve truly grown up and out with. That ascribes to them a kind of importance they probably never quite earned. Coldplay are a band who make music that is more likely to ring in your ears for days on end than rattle your brain the first time you hear it. The words never changed me, but the words amount to sounds, and the sounds made sense of the feelings I had as a kid. The sounds still evoke a feeling nowadays, but that feeling is less often sentimental and more just pleasant. I’m at a point where listening to Coldplay – the Coldplay I choose to go back to – is primarily joyful, occasionally a thrill, and, once in a blue moon, a quiet comfort.
Here is my ranking of Coldplay’s ten albums.
10. Moon Music (2024)
Coldplay released Moon Music just over a month ago and played four shows in Naarm (Melbourne) last week. That makes sense, until you realise that those shows were in support of the band’s previous album, released in 2021, and that the tour started in 2022, and that the tour won’t wrap up until September next year. As absurd as that scenario is, it’s actually a neat analogy for the present stage in the evolution of the biggest band in the world: so thoroughly have they perfected the art of a stadium show, and so completely disinterested are they in making thoughtful new music, that they are better viewed as stage performers than musicians. All of Coldplay’s innovation is now devoted towards pushing the boundaries of what a world tour can be.
I suppose that’s an interesting gambit. Their left-field attempts to make their tour more environmentally sustainable are commendable, even if there’s something a little off about watching devoted fans pedal pedal pedal for their chance to see Chris Martin up close. And it’s also a curious case in what to make of a band that simply never gets off the hamster wheel. Like, what happens to your legacy when you go round and round and round and round the world (four times) and barely scratch the surface of your vastly more impressive back catalogue? I have a view, and it gives me a whole new level of respect for Taylor Swift who fastidiously ensures equal representation for each of her musical ‘eras’ when she plays a show.
All of this is to say that I actually find it quite disheartening that the final straight of this monstrous Music of the Spheres Tour will see the addition of a handful of truly unappealing Moon Music songs at the expense of the precious few deep cuts the band are still willing to give a ring. It’s not that I have a problem with a 25-year-old band playin’ the new stuff, it’s that the new stuff sounds like the ditzy, maximalist filler you would expect a first-album-cycle band to bash out in two months after being told they’ve been accidentally booked to play an arena run. Coldplay have ‘White Shadows’ in their arsenal, you know? If they want a track to fill a coliseum with goosebumps, they don’t need to trudge into a studio, they really just need to jog their memory. Maybe one day they’ll stumble upon it.
9. Music of the Spheres (2021)
These two albums constitute the Maroon 5-ification of Coldplay – the blatant sidelining of Guy (bassist), Will (drummer) and Jonny (lead guitarist) so Chris can sing and flail about to the third-best beats of Max Martin without distraction. Music of the Spheres’ best song – the BTS collab ‘My Universe’ – was notionally made by 11 people yet sounds like it was made by two. I don’t mean that as a compliment.
It's just a completely inessential album. I know that because I wilfully didn’t listen to it until a couple weeks ago, for this piece, and I missed out on absolutely nothing. Only a couple tracks on Music of the Spheres sound even remotely novel, one of them being the brainless synth-pop single ‘Higher Power’ and the other being one of those terminally boring Jacob Collier mega-harmony songs, ‘Human Heart’. Everything else on the album has been done before but far, far more tactfully and melodically.
That’s the most disappointing thing about Music for the Spheres – Coldplay brought Max Martin into the mix, sold away any remaining personality they had, and didn’t even come away with a few rock-solid earworms to show for it. Surely, you’d think, one of the most melodically gifted bands of the 21st century could team up with the greatest hitmaker of all time to create at least one or two bulletproof pop gems? I guess not. The Earth must be turning in its grave.
8. Ghost Stories (2014)
The best of Coldplay always keeps you hanging on through the stretches of doubt. I mean, the best of Coldplay is hard for anyone to argue against, and boy have people tried. For me, the fatal flaw of Ghost Stories is that it never shows you the best of Coldplay. Up until a few years ago, it was the only album that had that property. Ghost Stories is honestly not that bad, and rarely if ever grating. But it’s rarely great, and that’s always been pretty essential to my goodwill towards the band.
I’ve never really enjoyed ‘Magic’ or ‘Ink’; I’ve grown out of ‘A Sky Full of Stars’ even if I do have a soft spot for that chord progression; I find the mournful tracks on the album (‘Midnight’, ‘Another’s Arms’, ‘Oceans’, and ‘O’) pretty effective but not terribly distinctive. The songs on Ghost Stories I gravitate towards are the two that are the most hopeful: ‘Always In My Head’ and ‘True Love’. That hope seems to border on desperation, which I like, because it means you accidentally get to hear a more honest version of Chris than his lyrical talents tend to allow.
The oddity of ‘True Love’ is especially compelling. It hinges on one very (in my opinion) un-Chris Martin line, “just tell me you love me / and if you don’t then li-eeeeee to me”, and the way he stretches that syllable out far beyond comfort is quite devastating. Yet the sound of the song strangely evokes a Disney fairytale, and near the end, out of nowhere, Jonny Buckland rips a completely discordant guitar solo. It’s mesmerising purely because it’s so unexpected – ten years and I still haven’t been able to figure out whether it’s any good or not. It’s at least the sound of Coldplay saying, “if the fans don’t get it, fuck it", finally, “neither do we.”
7. A Head Full of Dreams (2015)
Coldplay waste no time making the big statements they felt they had to make on A Head Full of Dreams, a shameless pop course-correction released only a year after the maudlin Ghost Stories. Within the first five tracks, you get a double-dose of energised Swedish post-disco (‘A Head Full of Dreams’ and the excellent ‘Adventure of a Lifetime’), a high-gloss R&B cut featuring Beyoncé (‘Hymn for the Weekend’), and Chris Martin’s final word on his dissolved marriage, the lighters-up elegy ‘Everglow’. Best of all is ‘Birds’, a Phoenix-inspired burst of motorik pop with a jaw-droppingly beautiful chorus, the finest song Coldplay has made since Mylo and which is likely to remain that way.
Speaking of big statements, check out the names hidden in the credits behind the album’s wretched cover art – not just Beyoncé, but Blue Ivy Carter, Avicii, Gwyneth Paltrow (in an act of conscious recoupling), Tove Lo, Brian Eno, Noel Gallagher, and fucking Barack Obama. It takes a pretty utilitarian band to bring all those names together on a record – the kind of band that Coldplay were in 2015 – and accordingly, the second half of A Head Full of Dreams is a collection of stadium-sized, bright, bland canvasses designed for mass appeal.
‘Fun’, ‘Up&Up’, ‘Army of One’ – all of those songs are pleasant enough, but in shooting for pure guitar-driven bliss, the simple fact they’re not ‘Strawberry Swing’ or ‘The Hardest Part’ makes them kind of disappointing by definition. ‘Amazing Day’ fares a little better because it dials the schmaltz way up and just shoots for pure goosebumps. It’s strange to think it’s one of the last times Coldplay really succeeded in that endeavour.
6. Everyday Life (2019)
If Coldplay were any other band, this would be the return-to-form album. The bounce-back to artistic, rather than simply commercial, ambition. The welcome embrace of the loyal oldhead fans who hung on through the shameless pop phase hoping to hear something authentic once again.
Except return-to-form albums rarely find a band in-form, and Coldplay’s fans aren’t really the type to be disillusioned with a pivot to pop. At its core, Coldplay’s music didn’t really become any less thoughtful in the 2010s, it just became a little less organic. So it’s not like the legitimately organic sound of Everyday Life was an obvious signifier that the music would be as good as it used to be.
But it’s still a nice, curious record. And it is a little better than the two albums that came before it. Everyday Life sounds like the product of genuine inspiration and relatively little perspiration. It’s no wonder you won’t hear any of the album’s songs at Coldplay’s hotbox of a stadium show.
The distinctive thing about Everyday Life is how little it feels like the creation of four bandmembers and a producer. Around half of its songs give the impression of many, many people being invited into the studio. The album prominently features choirs (on ‘BrokEn’, ‘When I Need A Friend’ and ‘Orphans’ most notably), is bookended by orchestral pieces, and reaches its climax when its centrepiece, ‘Arabesque’, adds a wild horn section to its jam-band shuffle.
Yet the other half is mostly comprised of songs that are as small as anything the band has released this side of ‘U.F.O’. Two of the tracks with just Chris and his acoustic guitar stand out to me. ‘Guns’ is a refreshingly plain send-up of gun violence that summons a laugh when Chris inverts a classic Coldplay stereotype: “everything’s gone so crazy / everybody but you”. ‘WOTW / POTP’, on the other hand, catches Chris in an unguarded moment, rehearsing a simple refrain that could almost be a thesis statement for his band’s wide-eyed motivation, “wonder of the world, power of the people”.
5. Parachutes (2000)
Coldplay have never released a high-stakes album; Parachutes is the only one that sounds like it. I find it quite charming how withdrawn and introspective it is. It’s really stark how differently Chris sings on Parachutes compared to A Rush of Blood to the Head just two years later and everything after that, and refreshing to hear the operation of the band before they understood their bankability hinged on Chris’ dramatic, yearning voice. Most of the time, it sounds like he’s just muttering to himself, going over his lines to make sense of them in his head as the band rehearses. The songs themselves move with a calm ease that’s unlike the rest of Coldplay’s catalogue; it’s comfortably their most band-ly record in that sense.
Chris was enough of a professional by Parachutes to know to reach into his trademark falsetto when it came time to really nail a tune, but still none of his choruses land with even an iota of the intensity of ‘Clocks’. That’s not a bad thing. Songs like ‘Don’t Panic’ and ‘Sparks’ have endured because their vaguely forlorn sound isn’t overpowered by Chris’ airy, wistful voice. ‘Yellow’ is so uncompromisingly beautiful because he chooses to sing delicately against the sonorous heft of the prettiest post-grunge guitars you’ve ever heard.
And, yeah, the album is diet Radiohead. But that much was always known to the Coldplay true believers. You might choose to listen to ‘Shiver’ over ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ for the same reason you might choose to eat Heinz baked beans over a more artisan version: sure, the sugar is masking a lack of substance, body, that rich tomato pith, but the simple sweetness was what you wanted all along.
4. X&Y (2006)
Poor X&Y, the scapegoat of Coldplay’s discography. It has become the consensus dud from the band’s earlier catalogue, lashed for being too maximalist, too overwrought, too Coldplay, such that it collapses under its own weight.
Too maximalist? I couldn’t disagree more. Maybe it’s just personal, but I find the sound of X&Y awesome and moreish. Too Coldplay? Maybe. X&Y sounds like Coldplay more than any other Coldplay record, in my opinion: the arena-ready production; the indelible melodies; Jonny Buckland’s piercing slide guitar; the neither-here-nor-there writing. And people tend to have strong feelings about Coldplay, so maybe it makes sense that an hour’s worth of the band at their most essential would earn a mixed reception.
But that won’t stop me claiming X&Y is home to some of the best Coldplay songs ever. ‘White Shadows’ and ‘Low’ are two of the most full-throttle cuts the band have ever made, both jolts of expansive post-punk that only get more tense and climactic as they progress. The rest of the band whip up controlled chaos while Chris stands in the middle of it, as calm and confident as he has ever been, and delivers arguably his most dynamic vocal performances on record. Both tracks attain a kind of visceral catharsis that Coldplay have only sporadically gone searching for in their 25 years as a band. So too does ‘Twisted Logic’, a sweeping, cinematic waltz that ends in a show-stopping fury and could be the coolest Coldplay have ever sounded.
It also won’t stop me claiming X&Y bats a lot deeper than people give it credit for. ‘Square One’, ‘Talk’, and ‘X&Y’ are genuinely compelling mini-developments in the band’s sound from A Rush of Blood to the Head. ‘The Hardest Part’ just sounds really nice. Honestly, so does ‘Swallowed in the Sea’. What I will admit is that the lowpoints on X&Y – namely ‘What If’ and ‘Fix You’ – are hard to swallow in the context of the longest studio recording Coldplay has ever put out. In the end, that’s why #4.
It’s funny how an album that isn’t at all artistically challenging can provoke such disdain. Yet that treatment bears striking resemblance to Coldplay writ large, a band whose utterly pleasant music has made them totally divisive. In the end, X&Y has come to be their defining record. So if you’re looking for the core of Coldplay, I’d suggest it’s hidden somewhere in their third album. Password’s on the cover.
3. Mylo Xyloto (2011)
Put simply, this is the album that is ageing the most gracefully in Coldplay’s catalogue. Forget the strained counter-culture concept and the graffiti-stained cover art – Mylo Xyloto is dynamic, considered, and unusually tasteful, threading together frothy pop-rock, lovelorn R&B, and gentle acoustic balladry in a way that still sounds exciting today.
In 2011, it pushed Coldplay to a slightly new frontier, honing in on the blissful essence of the band’s appeal while also relinquishing them of their more serious impulses. This was a really clever development, especially looking back. No doubt to the credit of producer Brian Eno, the ethos of Mylo was thoughtfully aligned with both the band Coldplay were and what they wanted to be. It pivoted away from the stylings of alternative rock du jour, deliberately sacrificing substance and detail for pure, unadulterated feeling, which actually placed them at the vanguard of pop music, which was moving in an escapist, anthemic direction.
Mylo could be Chris’ best work as a writer. Freed from some of the pressure of living up to the lyrical prowess of his heroes – Thom Yorke, Morrissey, Michael Stipe – his writing sounds looser, more rhythmic, and perhaps a little more resonant on Mylo compared to records before and after. Two of the album’s highlights, ‘Hurts Like Heaven’ and ‘Every Teardrop is a Waterfall’, take their titles from kitschy, koan-like lyrics that seem like they would be absolute blunders until you hear Chris sing them, absolutely overcome with emotion and verve. Both songs are just electrifying from front to back, scaled up to eye-watering proportions with soaring, sentimental instrumentals and massive vocal performances.
I could say the same about ‘Don’t Let It Break Your Heart’, one of the all-time Coldplay hidden gems, and how it feels to hear the band belt out its warm, humble chorus as loud as any they’ve ever played. Like, how fucking good does this sound? Even when Chris’ writing does occasionally falter, as on ‘Charlie Brown’ and ‘Major Minus’, the sheer thrill of the music more than compensates.
The album sounds just as good at its smallest: ‘U.F.O.’ is one of the leanest songs Coldplay have recorded, and it’s one of the most beautiful they’ve written. It also sounds just as good at its most audacious: the slow-motion dark disco of the Rihanna duet ‘Princess of China’ is otherwise unchartered territory for Coldplay but they pull it off stunningly, letting the song unravel into a glittering spectacle.
So much of Mylo is pure ear candy, and yet it doesn’t really feel like a guilty pleasure to listen to. The album manages to sound free of pretension and at the same time genuinely inspired, a balance probably afforded to it by arriving at a transitional moment for the band as they entered the 2010s. Most tellingly, it offered a sparkling vision of the generational pop band Coldplay could have been. Knowing now how that promise turned out, Mylo turns out to be a more important time capsule than anyone could have anticipated at the time.
2. A Rush of Blood to the Head (2002)
A Rush of Blood to the Head vindicates Coldplay’s efforts to actually try to make high art. Somewhere between the release of Viva La Vida and Mylo Xyloto, the band quietly shelved their quest to be one of the best bands in the world and, as Ian Cohen so brilliantly puts it, graciously settled for being one of the biggest. But I’m firm in the belief that for as long as Coldplay was punching above their weight in the 2000s, attempting but narrowly failing to unify their many fans and critics, they were making some of the most transcendent rock music of their era. The band might never have truly stuck the landing in their quest to make a perfect art-rock record, but the earnest ambition of A Rush of Blood to the Head is the reason why it is probably both the Coldplay Fan’s Coldplay Album and the Coldplay Casual’s Coldplay Album.
A Rush of Blood to the Head is not diet Radiohead. It’s not diet U2, either. And it doesn’t really bear resemblance to any of the albums from the infamous Coldplay acolytes – Keane, Matchbox Twenty, The Fray – as much as they do the other way. It’s surprisingly difficult to point to an album that A Rush of Blood to the Head sounds a whole lot like, despite Coldplay’s reputation for being derivative. It isn’t as brazenly anthemic as U2’s proto-Achtung Baby work, nor is it as intellectual as what Radiohead were putting out at the time. It aims for somewhere in the middle, and the result is an intensely elegant, atmospheric record.
Its sound is a kind of spectral, soaring, unusually piano-centric post-punk. Guy Berryman and Will Champion’s rhythm section is the unsung hero here, responsible for most of the album’s dynamic range through injections of krautrock propulsion on ‘Politik’, ‘Daylight’ and ‘A Whisper’ and the backpocket breaks of ‘God Put a Smile Upon Your Face’ and ‘Warning Sign’. And yet it would be a lie to suggest the A Rush of Blood to the Head’s most enduring moments are made up of anything but an ephemeral Coldplay alchemy. The component parts of ‘In My Place’ don’t selectively explain why it’s such an irresistible pop song; the brilliance of ‘Clocks’ comes from a full-band commitment to sweeping grandeur. Even ‘The Scientist’, the Chris Martin spotlight moment to end all Chris Martin spotlight moments, relies on the magic of the collective to deliver its show-stopping bittersweetness, the band’s trudging instrumental compelling Chris down the lonely road away from his lover.
The title track, ‘A Rush of Blood to the Head’, is one of my favourite Coldplay songs. I think it’s one of the saddest – the drama and catharsis of the track is dialled all the way up, like most Coldplay songs in this period of the band’s evolution, but it’s deliberately uncertain in a way that isn’t at all typical for a Coldplay song. The drawn-out consequences of (metaphorically speaking) buying a house and setting it on fire, or buying a gun and starting a war, are left unsaid. The closest the band comes to providing an answer is in the swaying, queasy groove that follows the climactic final chorus – a passage of calm that somehow signals at the same time that all hope is lost.
1. Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends (2008)
That tack piano is one of the best sounds in rock music. Ever. Up there with Johnny Marr’s lead guitar, Peter Hook’s bass, David Byrne’s elastic yelp, and Xandy Chelmis’ steel pedal.
I’m referring to the curious instrument you hear on ‘Lovers In Japan’, the thing that sounds like a tinny, luminescent piano, bouncily beating out the most euphoric melody Coldplay have ever crafted. That tack piano is the sound that defines Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends for me – vaguely arcane, almost honky-tonk, but so massive and earnest in its sound and emotion that it opens up a dialogue with not just Coldplay’s earlier catalogue, but the entire history of 20th century popular music.
Big call. I’m not saying Viva La Vida was revolutionary – despite the album’s conceptual allusions – or even on the level of a record like In Rainbows, which came out around the same time. But it did prove some kind of essential truth about pop music: that big, black-and-white feelings never really go out of currency, so long as you know how to lean on the curious sounds of the past to interpret them.
Because that’s who Chris Martin is, right? A big, black-and-white feelings guy, someone who has never been all that interested in ruminating on shades of grey. Not that he doesn’t try to fool you, occasionally: there’s a song on Viva La Vida called ‘42’, in reference to the ambiguous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy answer to the meaning-of-life. But, thankfully, the album doesn’t shy away from the classic Coldplay one-size-fits-all perspective. When the feeling is good, it’s better than it ever has been. When conflict is in the air, the turmoil is blown up to French Revolution proportions.
That approach is especially thrilling on when set to the most interesting music of the band’s career. Viva La Vida retains the proggy, Pink Floyd-isms of X&Y while massively diversifying its instrumental palate à la the Beatles’ Revolver, and presents it all with the drama and melodic flair of a mid-period Cure record. The opening theme to the album, ‘Life in Technicolor’, pairs a classic Jon Hopkins ambient loop with a spritely Indian santoor melody and somehow turns it into a full-band affair. You hear the influence of solemn 70s soul on ‘42’ and huge orchestral swells on the indomitable ‘Viva La Vida’. Slick, bluesy funk comes through on ‘Cemeteries of London’ and ‘Yes’, the latter of which features a hidden shoegaze interlude. A genuine reverence for the diverse, global history of rock music shines through Viva La Vida like no other Coldplay record.
If I can step into first person one last time, I should say that Viva La Vida’s closing suite is about the most special I’ve heard on any album: ‘Violet Hill’ into ‘Strawberry Swing’ into ‘Death and All His Friends’. I think ‘Violet Hill’ is my favourite Coldplay song, a merciless, crunching noise-rock cut that finds the band in breathtaking symbiosis: Chris’ furious performance absorbs the confidence of Guy’s strutting bassline while Jonny’s screaming lead guitar saturates the mix. It falls into ‘Strawberry Swing’, the prettiest song the band have ever recorded, a wide-screen adaptation of Congolese rhumba that goes over so well it continues to stupefy both Coldplay’s fans and detractors. And it ends with ‘Death and All His Friends’, a rousing, multi-part anthem with heavy dose of melancholy and a gleam in the eye. It’s a rare non-linear experiment that I can’t do a great deal of justice to describe.
I don’t know what the future holds for Coldplay. The band are still massively relevant, but I get the feeling their continued status is being actively fuelled by finite resources: a lingering goodwill from the general public, the endurance to push through four-year world tours, and the shared glow of artists in the zeitgeist. It took them 13 years to return to the Billboard #1 position after ‘Viva La Vida’ captured the wonder and attention of the world in 2008, and they needed the help of seven young, world-conquering Koreans to do it. So when I play ‘Viva La Vida’, that most enduring Coldplay song, and listen to Chris proclaim, “I used to rule the world”, it’s hard not to hear it as an elegy for his own band. Over time, two truths about Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends have revealed themselves: that it is the best Coldplay album, and that it is, at its core, an impassioned plea to not go down with the ship. Listening to the record today, then, is an unexpectedly sad affair when you consider the dim fate of the Coldplay juggernaut.
Sam Gollings
10 November 2024