25 Years Later, Coldplay’s Parachutes Feels Like a Lost Masterpiece

“Sparks,” a rather deep cut from Coldplay’s debut album Parachutes, has just made its debut on the Billboard Hot 100 25 years after its release.

A recent viral video of frontman Chris Martin performing the song at Coldplay’s tour stop in Las Vegas was the catalyst; with rumors swirling around about the end of Martin’s relationship with Dakota Johnson, the clip of him baring his soul and really feeling the weight of the words he wrote decades ago is undeniably potent. It’s led to a wave of singer-songwriters sharing their own interpretations of the song, specifically Martin’s more heart-strung version, where he attacks the words “I won’t let you down/ Yes I will/ Yes I will” like he’s reliving the moment his relationship fell apart in real time.

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Watching Martin strip away the lasers and fireworks and stadium-sized fanfare of Coldplay in 2025, where cultures collide and  dreams come true, is mesmerizing. It’s not just a passionate representation of where Martin is emotionally right now, it’s a reminder of how transcendent and understated this band once was and still can be. The clip, with its imperfections and raw vulnerability, epitomizes Parachutes, a hall of fame-level debut album that trusted in subtlety over spectacle.

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♬ I know I was wrong – Diana🌙

It’s easy to lose sight of Coldplay’s unassuming origins considering what they’d eventually become. This is a band that now communicates solely in capital letters, primary colors, and (I’m not kidding) emojis; they’ve expanded their status to become one of the most bankable touring acts of all time and have done so by offering bold, uniting anthems about our shared humanity in the vast cosmos of the universe and how we all have a glorious inner power to tap into.

It feels like an oversimplification to consider this shift the product of ‘selling out,’ an idea that’s starting to feel meaningless in the streaming age. In fact, as someone who has written a scathing review of 2021’s Music of the Spheres and bemoaned their creative direction of late, I’ve come around to the idea that Coldplay are making so many people happy that they can’t be faulted for the broad strokes anymore; their last album, Moon Music, also made it clear that this was the work of a band, not just Chris Martin’s solo project.

But somewhere along the way — quite possibly the turning points of 2011’s arena-ready Mylo Xyloto and 2013’s lackluster Ghost Stories — Coldplay stopped focusing on trying to make their music as beautiful as possible and began focusing on making sure their music was a force of unity above all else. This makes revisiting Parachutes like finding an artifact from a lost civilization, evidence of a more delicate, thoughtful world that existed before everything had to be built for maximum impact.