X&Y by Coldplay

X&Y, Coldplay's third album, arrived on Parlophone in Britain on 6 June 2005 and on Capitol in America a day later, after sessions that were anything but serene. Their manager and creative director Phil Harvey stepped away for a spell, and a whole batch of songs got thrown out because the band couldn't stand them.

What survived is big, glossy and very long, 62 minutes and 30 seconds, the longest studio album they've made, split into halves labelled "X" and "Y". Even the cover is a puzzle, blocks of colour spelling out the title in Baudot code. The music aims for the stadium roof: "Speed of Sound" rolls in on a surging, cathedral-sized groove, "Fix You" builds from a hush to a lighters-up crescendo, and "Talk" chugs along on a chiming riff. Hidden at the end, marked only with a "+", is "Til Kingdom Come", a song meant for Johnny Cash to sing with Chris Martin before Cash died.

The expectations were enormous and the numbers met them. It went to number one in 32 countries, EMI shipped more than 5 million copies in the first week, it gave the band the third-highest debut ever in the UK and their first Billboard 200 chart-topper, and its 8.3 million copies made it the year's biggest seller anywhere. "The Hardest Part" joined the other three as a single. Oddly, the band themselves have cooled on it over the years, soured by the fraught sessions and let down by how it turned out.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.