11 years ago today, Coldplay released “Adventure of a Lifetime.” It still sucks.
The music video is the four of them in motion-capture suits, rendered as CGI monkeys dancing in a jungle. Nobody in the room stopped this from happening. And honestly, it’s the most accurate visual representation of the band’s creative process to date: primates pressing buttons and hoping something sticks. The song itself is a disco-funk guitar riff that sounds like it was pulled from a Maroon 5 reject pile, Chris Martin singing “turn your magic on” over it like a man reading a fortune cookie aloud at dinner. The lyrics rhyme “dream away” with “dream away.” Not a typo. This was the lead single from A Head Full of Dreams, an album title that promised imagination and delivered a Target commercial. Eleven years later it’s still getting played in spin classes, which tracks, because nobody in a spin class is actually listening to the music.
Here’s what you should listen to instead (all from 2015, the year Coldplay wasted):
- Jamie xx - Gosh (from In Colour). One track that contains more ideas than Coldplay’s entire discography. The build alone is worth the runtime.
- Floating Points - Silhouettes (I, II & III) (from Elaenia). Sam Shepherd spent five years making this album. It sounds like it. Coldplay spent about five minutes on theirs.
- Bicep - Dahlia. Belfast house that was already running circles around stadium pop before these two got famous.
- Disclosure ft. Lorde - Magnets (from Caracal). Pop crossover done by people who actually understand dance music. The bar was right there, Coldplay.
- Flume - Some Minds ft. Andrew Wyatt. Australian future bass with more groove in its opening thirty seconds than “Adventure of a Lifetime” manages across four minutes.