Coldplay
Four university friends from London who turned quiet melancholy into the biggest sound of the decade. From "Yellow" to "Clocks" to "Fix You" to "Viva la Vida," Coldplay was the default soundtrack of the 2000s — the band on every mixtape, every TV drama's saddest scene, and every iPod's most-played list, whether you admitted it or not.
Chris Martin and guitarist Jonny Buckland met during their first week at University College London in September 1996 and started writing songs together; bassist Guy Berryman and drummer Will Champion completed the lineup, and by 1998 Coldplay existed in the form that has never changed since. The breakthrough came in the summer of 2000 with "Yellow" — a love song built on one word and one chord change — and the debut album Parachutes, which won the Brit Award for British Album of the Year and a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album. The "Yellow" video was its own accidental masterpiece: one continuous slow-motion shot of Martin alone on a rain-swept English beach, filmed the day of drummer Will Champion's mother's funeral, which is why he's the only one in it.
From there the band scaled up in near-perfect steps. A Rush of Blood to the Head (2002) delivered "Clocks" and "The Scientist" and another Grammy; X&Y (2005) gave the decade "Fix You," its all-purpose crying anthem, and became the best-selling album of 2005 worldwide at 8.3 million copies. Then Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends (2008) — produced with Brian Eno, fronted by a title track about a deposed king — topped charts around the world, became 2008's best-selling album globally, and gave the band its first single to hit No. 1 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the UK chart. At the 2009 Grammys, "Viva la Vida" won Song of the Year.
Coldplay carried on into stadium-spectacle superstardom — over 160 million records sold and counting — but the 2000s are the era the band owns in memory: burned onto mix CDs, quoted in away messages, scoring every slow-motion TV goodbye. For a certain generation, the sound of feeling things quietly is four guys from London.
Similar items
The Fray
The Denver piano-rock band whose earnest, mid-tempo anthems were the sound of mid-2000s radio and every emotional TV montage of the era. "Over My Head" broke them; "How to Save a Life," supercharged by Grey's Anatomy, made them huge.
Garden State
A numbed-out actor comes home to New Jersey for his mother's funeral, meets a girl who lies compulsively and feels everything, and slowly wakes up. Zach Braff wrote, directed, and starred in his 2004 indie debut while playing J.D. on Scrubs — and its Grammy-winning Shins-and-Coldplay soundtrack became the mixtape of the mid-2000s.
"Drops of Jupiter" by Train
She's back in the atmosphere with drops of Jupiter in her hair — the piano-and-strings ballad that soaked every radio format in 2001 and never really left. Pat Monahan wrote it after dreaming of his late mother, which is why a song about swimming through planets and fried chicken can still make people cry at a grocery store.
311
The Omaha band that fused alt-rock, reggae, funk, and rap into a laid-back sound built for summer. Their 1995 self-titled "Blue Album" broke them nationwide on the strength of "Down" and "All Mixed Up," and their two-vocalist lineup has stayed intact for decades.