X&Y

The band spent all of 2004 making it. Ken Nelson started the sessions, but they were unhappy with the results and discarded many songs. Of sixty songs written, fifty-two were dropped, and they brought in Danton Supple, who had mixed most of A Rush of Blood to the Head, to oversee production. Phil Harvey briefly left during the period. The cover shows the title in Baudot code, designed by Tappin Gofton, and the tracks are numbered X1 to X6 and Y1 to Y6, with a hidden song, Til Kingdom Come, labelled with a plus sign. It was first planned for Johnny Cash to record that song with Martin, but Cash died before he could. Talk borrows its hook, with permission, from Kraftwerk's Computer Love.

It reached number one in 32 countries, with EMI shipping over five million copies in the first week. It was the best-selling album of 2005, with 8.3 million copies, and in the US it was their first number one on the Billboard 200. NME called it confident, bold and ambitious, while Pitchfork's Joe Tangari found it bland but never offensive. Martin later said the band failed to get the songs produced or edited right and that the album was too long. He said he was proud of Fix You. The singles were Speed of Sound, Fix You, Talk and The Hardest Part.