Coldplay

From a university hall to Parlophone

Coldplay came together in London in 1997, when Chris Martin, Jonny Buckland, Guy Berryman and Will Champion met at University College London. The line-up has never changed: Martin sings and plays piano, Buckland plays guitar, Berryman plays bass and Champion plays drums. Phil Harvey, a schoolfriend of Martin's, has been part of the operation since the start and is now credited as the group's manager and creative director, to the point where the band routinely describe him as a fifth member.

They were briefly called Big Fat Noises, then Starfish, before settling on Coldplay in 1998. That year they pressed the Safety EP themselves, followed in 1999 by the single Brothers & Sisters, and the same year they signed to Parlophone. Parachutes arrived in 2000, and Yellow, its second single, did the work of turning four students into a national concern. A Rush of Blood to the Head followed in 2002 and X&Y in 2005, by which point the band had moved from mid-sized halls to arenas and had begun the long association with Wembley Stadium that would define their later career.

The records that built a stadium act

The discography runs to ten studio albums: Parachutes (2000), A Rush of Blood to the Head (2002), X&Y (2005), Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends (2008), Mylo Xyloto (2011), Ghost Stories (2014), A Head Full of Dreams (2015), Everyday Life (2019), Music of the Spheres (2021) and Moon Music (2024). The catalogue supplies most of what a modern Coldplay show is made of, and the 2025 setlists drew from nearly every one of those records, reaching as far back as Trouble and Don't Panic from the debut.

Viva la Vida remains the pivot. It was the record on which the band stopped sounding like a very large indie group and started sounding like a band built for open-air spaces, and its title track still sits near the centre of the live set. Mylo Xyloto and A Head Full of Dreams pushed the colour and the pop instincts further, and it was the 2016 A Head Full of Dreams shows that established the wristbands, confetti and fireworks that audiences now treat as standard equipment.

The trophy cabinet is broad rather than surprising. The band have seven Grammy Awards, hold the record for the most Brit Awards won by any group, and have sold more than 160 million records worldwide, which puts them among the best-selling acts of any era.

Moon Music and the sound of a band in mid-life

Moon Music, the tenth album, was released on 4 October 2024 through Parlophone in the UK and Atlantic in the United States. It was framed as the second half of the Music of the Spheres project, and it was made over two years with a production team led by Bill Rahko, Dan Green, Michael Ilbert and Max Martin, with Jon Hopkins, Ilya Salmanzadeh, Oscar Holter and The Chainsmokers contributing. The three singles were Feelslikeimfallinginlove on 21 June 2024, We Pray on 23 August 2024 and All My Love on the day of release.

Commercially it did what a Coldplay record does. It went in at number one in the UK on 236,796 units and at number one on the Billboard 200 on 120,000 equivalent units, making Coldplay the first British group to top both charts in the same week since The 1975 in 2016. The physical release was pitched as a sustainability statement: the CDs used 90 per cent recycled polycarbonate and each vinyl copy was pressed from nine recycled plastic bottles, which the band said avoided more than 30 tonnes of virgin plastic.

Critics were cooler than buyers. The album holds a Metacritic score of 58, with reviewers praising the melodic range and finding the lyrics thin. Martin described the record as a journey from feeling depressed, isolated and separate towards the opposite, and that arc is audible in the way the live show now ends: the last two songs on every night of the 2025 run were Feelslikeimfallinginlove and All My Love.

A tour that rewrote the numbers

The Music of the Spheres World Tour opened on 18 March 2022 at the Estadio Nacional in San José, Costa Rica, and ran for three and a half years before pausing on 12 September 2025 at Wembley Stadium. By that point it had played 225 shows in 80 cities across 43 countries to 13.1 million people, grossing 1.52 billion dollars. It is the most-attended tour ever staged and the first by a band to pass a billion dollars in ticket revenue.

The Wembley finale was a ten-night residency spread across late August and early September 2025. Two of those dates, 7 and 8 September, were rescheduled at the end of August, which the band announced on 30 August. The residency became a rolling news event in London: an Oasis cover of Don't Look Back in Anger on 23 August, Simon Pegg on stage on 26 August, and Femi Kuti, Davide Rossi and Tim Wheeler as guests on 4 September. On 6 September Martin played a solo passage with the crowd supplying the vocals, and one night saw Cemeteries of London performed for the first time since 2011.

The tour was also the band's most elaborate attempt to make a stadium run defensible on environmental grounds. The band reported carbon emissions 59 per cent lower than the previous tour, with kinetic dance floors and more than 15 stationary bicycles for the audience to generate power, PixMob wristbands made from sugarcane, biodegradable confetti, low-energy LED lighting, a rechargeable mobile show battery developed with BMW, and nine million trees planted through One Tree Planted. The band say the tour will restart in 2027, but as of early September 2026 no dates or cities have been published.

Where they stand in September 2026

The year since Wembley has been quiet on the road and busy elsewhere. In April 2025 the band appeared on a single from the Arcane soundtrack, and Twice and Jasleen Royal versions of We Pray were released in April and February of that year. On 4 November 2025 the band ran a competition for tickets to a London show by Martin and Buckland as a duo, and on 10 December 2025 they announced a virtual-reality concert, a game pack and a set of workout videos, the first substantial products of the post-tour break.

The biggest single event was the FIFA World Cup final on 19 July 2026 at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. It was the first World Cup final to carry a halftime show, produced by FIFA and Global Citizen with Live Nation and Done+Dusted, and Martin helped select the performers. The headliners were Madonna, Shakira, BTS and Justin Bieber, with Burna Boy, Gustavo Dudamel, the New York Philharmonic, the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra and the Ghetto Kids among the guests. Coldplay themselves appeared only in the finale, premiering a new song, We Dance, alongside the PS22 Chorus, the Muppets, Sesame Street characters and Emmanuel Kelly. The show overran to roughly 27 minutes, and reviews were mixed: impeccably choreographed but thematically jumbled was the consensus, and Wayne Rooney dismissed it in a single word.

That leaves the band in an unusual position. They are the largest live draw on the planet by attendance, they have a new song in circulation, and they have nothing on sale. Everything Martin has said in public points to 2027 as the year the tour resumes, and the sensible reading is that the break is a pause rather than an ending.

What a Coldplay show is like now

The 2025 show runs a little over two hours and is built in four acts named Planets, Moons, Stars and Home, with a sub-section called The Lightclub inside the third. Time Out tracked the ten Wembley nights and counted 23 or 24 songs per show, of which 18 or 19 were fixed. That backbone runs Higher Power, Adventure of a Lifetime, Paradise, The Scientist, Viva la Vida, Hymn for the Weekend and Yellow across the opening stretch, then Human Heart, People of the Pride, Clocks, We Pray, Infinity Sign, Something Just Like This, My Universe and A Sky Full of Stars, before a closing run of Sparks, the Jumbotron Song, Fix You, Feelslikeimfallinginlove and All My Love.

The remaining slots rotate night to night, and that rotation is where regulars find their value. Across the residency the band swapped in Trouble, Charlie Brown, Politik, Green Eyes, In My Place, Don't Panic, Til Kingdom Come, Speed of Sound, The Hardest Part, Violet Hill, Cemeteries of London, Us Against the World, Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall, Magic, True Love, Everglow, Up&Up, Arabesque, Everyday Life, Bani Adam, Let Somebody Go, Humankind and Sunrise.

The staging is the one audiences have come to expect and still describe as overwhelming: LED wristbands pulsing in synchronised patterns across the whole bowl, clouds of confetti, fireworks, giant inflatable balls bouncing over the crowd, and at Wembley the arch lit as a rainbow. Reviewing the 26 August night for City AM, Siobhan Grogan called it an intensely feelgood two hours and singled out a tender Green Eyes, an epic Fix You, Viva la Vida with the Simón Bolívar Orchestra of Venezuela, and We Pray with its guest vocalists. The Jumbotron segment, which turns the screens on the audience, gained a second life in 2025 after a kiss-cam moment at a Boston show went round the world.

Support on the 2025 legs varied by territory and included Elyanna, Jasleen Royal, Twice, Willow and, on selected nights, Gustavo Dudamel. Martin's habit of thanking the crowd for the shenanigans involved in getting to a stadium is a reliable fixture. The one thing nobody can currently buy is a ticket.