By 2005 Coldplay were a stadium band who had not yet made a stadium record, and X&Y is the sound of them deciding to. It became the best-selling album in the world that year and hit No. 1 across much of it, led out by Speed of Sound. None of that came easily. The first sessions, with producer Ken Nelson, were largely scrapped; Danton Supple was brought in to finish a record that had clearly been fought over. You can hear the strain and the scale in the same breath, thirteen tracks of a band reaching for something vast, including a hidden one tucked past the run-out. Years later Chris Martin would call the whole thing a disappointment, blaming his own headspace at the time. He is half right and half too hard on it. The ambition is the point, and the ambition is everywhere.