Coldplay's 'A Head Full of Dreams' to Make Lukewarm Chart Debut
Coldplay will snap their string of four consecutive #1 albums when their new release, A Head Full of Dreams, enters the Billboard 200 chart at #2, behind Adele’s blockbuster 25. And it won’t even be close. Coldplay’s album is expected to sell in 190K range in its first week. Adele’s album will sell about 625K in its third week. The chart will be posted on Sunday, but industry sales projections are usually very close to the final result.
Fifteen albums have had first-week sales tallies of 190K or more in 2015. Among albums by pop or rock bands, Coldplay’s projected tally would place third or fourth for the year, behind One Direction’s Made in the A.M. (402K) and Mumford & Sons’ Wilder Mind (231K) and about even with Fall Out Boy’s American Beauty/American Psycho (192K). Coldplay would be just ahead of 5 Seconds of Summer’s Sounds Good Feels Good (179K) and Imagine Dragons’ Smoke + Mirrors (172K).
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All of these are hot bands. It’s just that Coldplay used to be at the very top of the heap, not just near the top. They peaked in the last decade when they released back-to-back studio albums, 2005’s X&Y and 2008’s Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends, which each started with sales north of 700K. Their next two studio albums had very solid, but not as spectacular, debuts. 2011’s Mylo Xyloto opened with sales of 447K. 2014’s Ghost Stories started with 383K. Based on the sales estimates, the new album will continue the slide.
Last month, the band performed on the American Music Awards for the first time in seven years. Bands of Coldplay’s stature don’t generally perform on that show. (The show’s focus is on hot newcomers.) The performance was seen as a sign that the band was willing to do whatever it takes to boost the new album and reverse that downward sales drift.
One problem: The album has yet to produce a smash hit. The first single from the album, “Adventure of a Lifetime” (which the band performed on the AMAs), has so far reached #53 on the Hot 100. By contrast, the key singles from the band’s four most recent studio albums were at least top 20 hits by the time those albums were released.
A Head Full of Dreams will be Coldplay’s first album to fall short of the #1 spot since their sophomore album, A Rush of Blood to the Head, which debuted and peaked at #5 in September 2002. That was the album that put Coldplay in the big leagues. Eight months later, a track from the album, “Clocks,” cracked the top 30 on the Hot 100. “Clocks” later won a Grammy for Record of the Year.
A Head Full of Dreams is Coldplay’s seventh studio album. It arrives a little more than 18 months after Ghost Stories. That’s the shortest gap between studio albums of Coldplay’s career.
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Group leader Chris Martin has suggested that A Head Full of Dreams will be the band’s last album, though his statement to that effect on a BBC 1 radio show a year ago was less than definitive. “It’s our seventh thing, and the way we look at it, it’s like the last Harry Potter book or something like that,” Martin said. “Not to say that there might not be another thing one day, but this is the completion of something.”
(Rock stars aren’t known for their eloquence.)
In a Q&A in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly, he’s equally hazy about his plans. “It’s a bit like a finale, or a final scene. Not that we’re splitting up.” But he also insists he has no plans for a solo album.
Coldplay is planning a 2016 stadium tour. The band didn’t tour behind Ghost Stories. That, along with their half-time performance at next year’s Super Bowl, might give the album some longer life.
A Head Full of Dreams will, at least, be the top-debuting album of the week. It will be followed by albums by hip-hop star G-Eazy, South African-born/Australia-based singer-songwriter Troye Sivan, and rapper Rick Ross.
A Head Full of Dreams will be the first newly released album to get stuck at #2 behind Adele’s 25. (The #2 album during the album’s first two weeks at #1 was Justin Bieber’s Purpose, which managed to grab a week at #1 before Adele took over.) A whopping 15 albums stalled at #2 behind Adele’s previous album, 21. The roster of luckless albums includes releases by such major names as Beastie Boys, Tim McGraw, Lana Del Rey, Van Halen, Alan Jackson, and Whitney Houston (following her death in 2012).
If 25 sells another 625K this week, as expected, Adele’s album will sprint past the 5 million mark in U.S. sales after just three weeks of release. (It total will be right around 5,115,000.) That would be by far the fastest that any album has reached 5 million since 1991, when Nielsen began tracking music sales. 21 took 42 weeks to reach the 5 million mark in U.S. sales.
