Everyday Life (Coldplay album)

Everyday Life is the eighth studio album by British rock band Coldplay. It was released on 22 November 2019 by Parlophone in the United Kingdom and Atlantic in the United States. It is a double album released as a single CD, with the first half titled Sunrise and the other Sunset. The release coincided with Coldplay: Everyday Life – Live in Jordan, in which performances of each half of the album were broadcast from the Amman Citadel in Jordan, at sunrise and sunset, respectively. Many returning producers and collaborators joined the band's efforts including Rik Simpson, Dan Green, Bill Rahko, Davide Rossi, and Emily Lazar.
Speculation about the album's existence persisted since their previous record, A Head Full of Dreams, as rumours circulated that Coldplay would disband. It is the first album by the band to feature profanity (on the tracks "Trouble in Town", "Arabesque" and "Guns") and is also their second studio album, after Ghost Stories (2014), not to be supported by a major worldwide tour.
Everyday Life received generally positive reviews from music critics, who praised its experimental direction, the shift to politically charged lyrics, and varied song styles in contrast to their old roots with albums like Parachutes and Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends. However, others felt that the album lacked thematic consistency. Commercially, Everyday Life earned the band their eighth consecutive number-one album on the UK Albums Chart and their seventh top-ten album on the Billboard 200 in the US.
The album was supported by four overall singles: "Orphans" and "Arabesque" in October 2019, "Everyday Life" in November 2019 and "Champion of the World" in February 2020. At the 63rd Grammy Awards the album garnered two nominations: Best Recording Package and Album of the Year, marking the band's second nomination in the latter category and their first since Viva la Vida.
Some tracks from Everyday Life have roots in 2009, a decade earlier; as producer Dan Green explains: "We actually started this album just before Mylo Xyloto in 2009, there were songs from this record that had been around since then which just didn't seem to fit on other albums. The single 'Arabesque' was one of those". Rik Simpson, another longtime member of the production team, stated that this album differed in recording style compared to previous records because three members of the band lived in the UK while lead singer Chris Martin lived in the US. The band hoped to travel somewhere to inspire the global sounds of Everyday Life rather than be restricted to a single studio. Therefore, Dan Green created a mobile studio, inspired from jam sessions during their previous world tour, to be set up in various international locations. They include but are not limited to: Villa Tombolino in Tuscany, the Woodshed studios in Los Angeles, The Bakery and Beehive studios in London, and a studio in Johannesburg, South Africa. Travelling around the globe is reflected in the experimental mix of genre influences present on the record including classical, afrobeat, jazz-fusion, etc. The album was one of the first non-reissue albums to be mixed using Dolby Atmos technology, with the Atmos version made available on Amazon Music, Tidal and Apple Music.
Everyday Life is a considerable shift in musical experimentation compared to the band's previous albums, with critics deeming it their most experimental release. Its release marks Coldplay's first studio double album, with the halves titled Sunrise and Sunset respectively (similarly to X&Y, which is split into an "X" half and a "Y" half, despite being a single album). The album includes a 30-second field recording of clock tower bells ringing the Westminster Quarters melody and spread across 8 tracks, entitled "God = Love", which serves as an interlude for each side of the album. The track titles spell the name of this section and are revealed when the CD is loaded into a computer.
When compared to previous albums released by the band, the lyrics make a stark contrast: even though it still showcases many themes of positivity, equality, unity, hope, legacy, the importance of emotions, and humanity, it also includes racism, police brutality, gun control, loss and pain, plus references of war in terrorism-inflicted countries. The song "Trouble in Town" includes a sample from a 2013 incident involving racially-motivated profiling and harassment of a man by a Philadelphia police officer, it is the first Coldplay song to feature profanity (although it is the police officer in the sound recording who uses profanity rather than the track's lyrics), along with "Arabesque" and "Guns" (which both feature profanity in their actual lyrics). Martin described the album saying that:
On 13 October 2019, black-and-white posters featuring the band teasing the album, and the date "22 November 1919" appeared in various cities around the world, including São Paulo, Berlin, Hong Kong and Sydney. On 19 October, a video teaser featuring the same theme was also released. Two days later, several fans began receiving typewritten notes from the band in the mail.
On 23 October, the track listing was announced by the band in the advertising sections of several newspapers around the world. This included the North Wales Daily Post, where guitarist Jonny Buckland "once had a holiday job". The 19 November edition of the New Zealand newspaper Otago Daily Times featured advertisements containing lyrics to the tracks from the album. The artwork for the album was created by Argentine artist Pilar Zeta, who worked on the artwork for the band's previous album A Head Full of Dreams.
The booklet included in the CD, vinyl, and digital download releases of the album feature lyrics for all tracks and credits. In the bifold of the book features a picture of a large billboard with "Music of the Spheres" in large text and "Coldplay coming soon" in the bottom left corner, teasing their following album Music of the Spheres. The poster also features a preliminary version of the album's artwork, the Map of the Spheres.
During an online press conference on 1 November, Coldplay announced they would perform Everyday Life in two shows at the Amman Citadel in Jordan, on 22 November, the release date of the album. The first show showcased the band performing the first half of the album Sunrise at 4:00 a.m. GMT, and the second show featured the performance of Sunset at 2:00 p.m. GMT. The shows, which were livestreamed on YouTube, marked the band's first ever performances in the country. Both shows were promoted and advertised as YouTube Originals. The two shows were performed without an audience, but the following night the band performed their first public show at the Citadel. On 18 November, the band announced a one-off show at the London Natural History Museum on 25 November, with proceeds from the show to be donated to an environmental charity. However, the band announced that they would not play a world tour to promote the album until they had addressed concerns regarding travel and the environmental impact of the shows. After taking two years to craft a sustainability plan for touring, Coldplay embark on the Music of the Spheres World Tour in March 2022 in support of their following albums, Music of the Spheres and Moon Music. The tour incorporated songs from Everyday Life into the set list.
According to Martin, the album "doesn't really have singles and was never meant to. We had to pull a song off it". "Orphans" and "Arabesque" were released as a double lead on 24 October 2019, during the Annie Mac show on BBC Radio 1. On the next day, a music video for "Orphans" came out. Its companion piece, "Arabesque", however, does not have one. "Everyday Life" was then launched as a promotional single on 3 November. Its music video premiered on 9 December and the song was sent to United Kingdom and Italy's contemporary hit radio in the following weeks. Two days before the album's release, a music video for "Daddy" and a lyric video for "Champion of the World" were made available, the latter impacted radio stations across the United States as a promotional single on 25 February 2020. The "Cry Cry Cry" music video, which was co-directed by Dakota Johnson, was released on 14 February. The "Trouble in Town" video came out on 12 March.
Everyday Life received generally positive reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album has an average score of 73 based on 26 reviews, which indicates "generally favorable reviews", becoming the band's second highest-scored album on the website, behind A Rush of Blood to the Head. Writing for The Daily Telegraph, Neil McCormick acclaimed the album's experimentation, stating that Everyday Life "feels organic, analogue and playful as Coldplay dip into different musical genres", and further highlighted Martin's "golden gift for melody, almost simplistically direct lyrics and emotive crooning". Chris DeVille of Stereogum considered that the use of multiple genres worked "more often than not", and commended the band's "more nuanced" exploration of social issues, concluding that it was a "truly great album". In her review for NME, Charlotte Krol claimed that the record "is proof that Coldplay are more adventurous than they're often given credit for", although some of its songs are "sometimes more exciting in theory than in practice".
Other reviewers were less enthusiastic about the album's experimentation. Although The Guardian's Alexis Petridis considered it a "laudable intention", he found the album "wildly uneven" and was critical of the "lyrical vagueness" of various songs dealing with "sociopolitical matters", but praised "a couple of acoustic tracks with genuine emotional heft". In the same vein, Adam White of The Independent called the album a "valiant, if flawed, attempt to break from tradition" and a "fascinating, occasionally brilliant curio", but considered that the band were "still very much figuring out how to respond to a world that has become meaner, dirtier and crueller", nevertheless considering the effort admirable. Ludovic Hunter-Tilney of the Financial Times found the album "platitudinising", but considered Martin's songwriting "more focused than usual"; he additionally noted its "quirky production" and balancing of "contradictory urges to play it safe and take a risk".
Everyday Life debuted at number-one on the UK Albums Chart with 80,974 units sold, becoming Coldplay's eighth consecutive studio album to achieve the feat and the third-fastest selling record of the year in the United Kingdom, behind Ed Sheeran's No.6 Collaborations Project and Lewis Capaldi's Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent. It debuted number seven on the United States' Billboard 200 with 48,000 equivalent units, including 36,000 pure album sales. According to the IFPI, the album sold 740,000 pure copies around the world in 2019, making it the 11th biggest record of the year. The release also made Coldplay the seventh most successful group of said period.
Coldplay's songwriting members are Guy Berryman, Jonny Buckland, Will Champion and Chris Martin.
Notes
Sample credits
Credits adapted from the "Orphans / Arabesque" liner notes.