A Rush of Blood to the Head

Recording began in London in September 2001 and moved to Liverpool, where the band had made part of Parachutes. Martin said they became obsessed with recording. In My Place was among the first songs recorded and became the lead single because it was the song that made them want to make a second album. Martin said he wrote the opening track, Politik, on 11 September and the band recorded it two days later. For a stretch, he and Buckland worked on their own at weekends and presented ideas to the others on Mondays. By June 2002 the band felt the record was rubbish and agreed with Parlophone to postpone it. Many songs were dropped because they sounded as if they could have been on Parachutes. Clocks, written late in the sessions and first filed as a demo for a third album, was reworked after the band headlined Glastonbury in 2002, and the release slipped by two months. Martin said the title means doing something on impulse. The cover is a three-dimensional scan of a model's head by the photographer Sølve Sundsbø, made originally for Dazed & Confused, and in 2010 it was one of ten classic album covers on Royal Mail stamps.

It debuted at number one in the UK with 273,924 copies, reached number one in 12 countries, and is certified 10x Platinum for three million copies. In the US it was the band's first record in the top five. At the Grammys it won Best Alternative Album, and In My Place and Clocks won Best Rock Performance and Record of the Year. Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffield called it a nervier, edgier, thoroughly surprising album. Petridis wrote that the timidity of Parachutes was nowhere to be found, though he also found it devoid of charming idiosyncrasy. Metacritic gives it 80, the highest score of any Coldplay album. Rolling Stone placed it at 324 on its 2020 list of the 500 greatest albums, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame put it on its 200 Definitive Albums list. In 2013 BBC Radio 2 listeners voted it their favorite album of all time ahead of Keane's Hopes and Fears, Duran Duran's Rio and Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon.