Snow Patrol

Snow Patrol’s grandiose rock ballads give melody and mood to love’s simple joys and tragic endings—the perfect soundtrack to both poignant onscreen moments and listeners’ own romantic scenes. While the UK band seemed to follow in Coldplay’s gentle footsteps, they began honing their craft in 1994, when Northern Ireland mates Gary Lightbody and Mark McClelland began writing songs together at Scotland’s University of Dundee. The local indie scene informed the group’s early forays into dissonant rock and the earnest pop, two styles that cohered on Snow Patrol’s scrappy first album, 1998’s Songs for Polar Bears. After inviting Nathan Connolly to join on lead guitar and recruiting producer Jacknife Lee for their 2003 major-label debut Final Straw, the band upped the epic quotient, swathing Lightbody’s lullaby croon in atmosphere-building effects (“How to Be Dead”) and swelling string crescendos (“Run”). Their tear-stained anthems, like the Grammy-nominated “Chasing Cars,” came to define major turning points on TV shows like Grey’s Anatomy and One Tree Hill. But even through a few lineup shifts and some agonizing bouts of writer’s block, the band’s most stirring works have always been their most exploratory. That applies to both sound—play the disco-kissed “Called Out In the Dark” or multi-movement rock symphony “The Lightning Strike”—and Lightbody’s continual soul-searching. Ultimately, the singer’s heart-wrenching confessions are as therapeutic for him as they are for the rest of us.