It's official: Coldplay have got more boring with age

Times

10-07-2025

In 2014, the year Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin announced they were consciously uncoupling, Coldplay released an album called Ghost Stories that was consciously uninteresting. Here was a band whose early Noughties singles had brought a new level of vulnerability to indie rock, whose singer became a touchstone for male sensitivity as we moved out of the laddish bonhomie of Nineties Britpop and into a more thoughtful, if less rebellious, approach to voicing young life in music.
• Read our music reviews, interviews and guides on what to listen to next
But by 2014 Coldplay had settled into a highly lucrative model of polished vapidity, rarely going towards the emotional fragility and musical nuance they captured in singles such as Trouble and Yellow, having learnt that repeating an essentially meaningless line again and again until stadiums chant it back to you is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser.
By the time of Ghost Stories, Coldplay appeared to have accepted that testing audiences means losing audiences. Better to stick to the rousing anthems, alongside a few intimate ballads hinting at vague universal depth, and reap the 100 million-selling rewards. 'The disappointment here is that a band with such clear intelligence and compassion have chosen to make an album so dull,' I wrote of Ghost Stories.
As it turns out, such critical bashing was — and this is highly unusual for me — rooted in scientific fact. A team at Durham University, possibly rather bored themselves, have analysed the rhythms, tempo, percussion and chords of songs by REM, Radiohead, Buddy Holly, Kirsty MacColl, Patsy Cline and Coldplay, and discovered that the band are officially lame. 'Coldplay shows a downwards trend in their harmonic daring as they increasingly become part of the pop mainstream,' concluded Professor Nick Collins, while stating that 'Radiohead maintain a high diversity of harmonic language'.
With immaculate timing, the scientific report on Coldplay's boredom rating comes after the hysteria around Oasis, the band who called it a day in 2009 after a decade and a half of fights, drugs, mayhem and generational epics exciting enough to make a vicar put a boot through a stained-glass window.
The hysteria around the return of Oasis wasn't simply about an entertaining band with an ability to make people feel alive. It was about a wilder, more carefree time, before the personal auditing of social media, when a group of working-class lads could invade the establishment and shake things up without fear of cancellation.
As Noel Gallagher put it in 2023 when I asked, just as reunion rumours began to swirl, if Oasis could happen today: 'We would be killed before we even started … 'Got this idea for a band. Couple of gobshite brothers from Manchester, bang into cocaine, lager and shagging birds, ripping off the Beatles and T. Rex.' 'Oh no, thank you.''
• Are you a modern bore? Step forward Swifties and Oasis fans
From the 2010s onwards, Coldplay did a thorough clean-up of the cigarette butt and empty bottle-strewn space left by Oasis and promptly installed a Gaggia coffee machine and a Gail's bakery. While formerly dangerous areas of London such as Dalston and Peckham underwent gentrification, Coldplay offered a new approach to pop fandom — and they weren't alone. Where once there were wild, pioneering figures like David Bowie and Madonna, the Noughties welcomed in relatable boy- and girl-next-door types like Ed Sheeran and Adele. Where once independent music was dominated by bona fide weirdos like the Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine, it became the time of Snow Patrol and Keane, bands that didn't so much challenge their fans as tell them everything was going to be OK.
Of course, boredom isn't necessarily a bad thing. Coldplay also represent a new era of decency in music; of thinking about the impact you have on others, of being polite and respectful, of picking up your rubbish and putting it in the correct recycling bin. In an age of increasing global volatility, Coldplay's wholesome enthusiasm and sense of reason becomes attractive. That is why their stadium concerts tend to be such joyful affairs. Yes, fire and ice are exciting and dangerous, but sometimes you just want to immerse yourself in lukewarm water.