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It’s nearly nine years since U2 released a collection of original material, 2017’s Songs of Experience. They’ve hardly been idle since: two tours, two films, a 40-date residency at the Las Vegas Sphere, nearly three hours of stripped-down re-recordings of old material on Songs of Surrender, plus Bono’s autobiography, which spawned a solo tour, a stint on Broadway and another film. An impressive workload by any standards.
Still, you could take the gap between original albums – the longest in U2’s history – as evidence of a problem that’s bedevilled the band for nearly 20 years: where do U2 fit into the current musical landscape?
The obvious answer is to acquiesce to the “heritage rock” label, rest on the laurels of their back catalogue and rake it in touring the hits. Clearly that doesn’t appeal, as evidenced by Bono and The Edge explaining that a 2017 tour playing 1987’s The Joshua Tree in full was not about nostalgia. So what else? They’ve tried everything, from reaffirming their experimental credentials on No Line on the Horizon to trying to play 21st-century pop at its own game – AutoTune on the vocals, hitmaker Ryan Tedder in the producer’s chair, a mooted but unrealised collaboration with David Guetta, a doomed attempt to engage with the era’s new means of distribution in their disastrous hook-up with Apple – without ever really recapturing the success or the spirit of their late 80s/early 90s imperial phase.
Which brings us to Days of Ash, not a taster for their forthcoming album but, like Bruce Springsteen’s recent Streets of Minnesota, an attempt to reanimate the protest-song-as-quickfire-response spirit of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s 1970 single Ohio. It’s an idea that you might have expected would have occurred to more people of late. If CSNY could get Ohio in the US chart within weeks of the Kent State shootings it commemorated – in 1970, when getting a single in the charts involved actually pressing records, distributing them to stores and servicing radio stations – then there seems no reason why artists can’t put the faster processes of the streaming era to use in that way: there’s something faintly depressing about the fact that it’s currently the province of old lags such as Springsteen and U2. Three of the EP’s five songs – there’s also a brief poetry-plus-ambient-instrumental interlude – commemorate recent deaths in conflicts and protests: those of nonviolent Palestinian activist Awad Hathaleen, 16-year-old Iranian protester Sarina Esmailzadeh, and, most recently, the shooting of Renee Nicole Good on 7 January.
The latter informs the EP’s lead track, American Obituary, on which U2 sound more righteously angry than they have in years, both in the lyrics, which have a confrontational man-the-barricades tone seldom heard in U2’s work since the era of War – “America will rise against the people of the lie … the power of the people is so much stronger than the people in power” – and musically: a stew of distorted guitar, growling bass and siren-invoking electronics.
On subsequent tracks the music shifts into less aggressive mode – more acoustic guitars, less of The Edge in full flight, a noticeably hazier ambience – and the lyrics take on a more familiar note of consolation and optimism: biblical imagery, distinctly Bono-esque aphorisms (“the future, as everyone knows, is where we’re gonna be spending the rest of our life”). But a genuine urgency remains, no doubt linked to the EP’s relatively quick turnaround. It’s in stark contrast to the mass of second-guessing, re-recording and abandoned projects that have marked U2’s last couple of decades; denying themselves the opportunity to overthink things seems to have sharpened U2 up. There’s a crispness to The Tears of Things’ assault on fascism and religious fundamentalism t felt noticeably absent from patches of their recent oeuvre. “When people go around talking to God it always ends in tears,” Bono sings.
It doesn’t all work. Their Ed Sheeran collaboration, Yours Eternally, is less jarring than some of the lunges for contemporaneity in U2’s 21st-century catalogue, but the problem is that the sound of Sheeran’s voice and guitar has become immediately recognisable thanks to its omnipresence over the last 15 years, which means that his guest appearance swamps the song by default.
You’d also hesitate to herald the EP as evidence of a new approach, not least because Bono has announced the music on their forthcoming album is nothing like this, more a “carnival vibe”. But what you can safely say is that U2’s aforementioned imperial phase was fuelled by an almost religious zeal, a firm sense of purpose and a belief in the power of music to effect change – the stuff that their hipper post-punk contemporaries found risibly uncool – and that zeal, purpose and belief has been recaptured here.
