“Viva La Vida” by Coldplay is one of the most iconic songs of the 2000s, a track that fused pop with the grandeur of historical imagery, personal downfall with public power, melodic immediacy with an atmosphere of near-imperial collapse. It was released in 2008 as the central axis of the band’s fourth album, Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, and very quickly became something much bigger than just another successful Coldplay single. It became the song that sealed their transition from what they themselves roughly called “Oldplay” into a new period, bolder, more theatrical, more open to different forms and ideas.