U2 HAVEN’T BEEN shy about taking on urgent or controversial issues in the past. They’ve brought us songs covering everything from Apartheid South Africa and the Troubles to drug addiction and divorce over the course of their 50-year career.

For the last decade or so, the odd new track aside, they’ve largely involved themselves in musical projects focused on repackaging and reinterpreting their own past work. 

There was a stadium-bothering tour celebrating the 30th anniversary of The Joshua Tree back in 2017, a spectacular reinvention of their 1990s Achtung Baby era at the Las Vegas Sphere and then an album of re-recorded back catalogue songs put together during the Covid lockdowns. 

It came as something of a surprise then, when news of a new EP went live on their website and social media accounts shortly after 5 o’clock this evening. 

Even more surprising – all six tracks seem to have something to say about major issues of our time. The songs include takes on the killing of Renée Good by ICE agents in Minneapolis, the Ukraine War, and Israel and Palestine. 

This release comes three years after their last single, Atomic City, released to tie in with their Achtung Baby shows in Las Vegas. Their previous release of an original song was a whole two years before that, written for the soundtrack of the animated movie Sing 2. The last full original album, Songs of Surrender, was released in December 2017. 

The band described ‘Days of Ash’ as a “current response to world events”. 

And while work continues on an album which, the band hinted, is likely to cover more upbeat ground, these songs “were impatient to be out in the world”. 

The reception

As you might expect, this has been huge news here in Ireland – so much so that both RTÉ and the Irish Times sent push alerts heralding the release. (The Journal had briefly debated doing so, but a brief internal debate was put to an end with the opinion that ‘people have had enough of getting U2 on their phones without asking’).

The coverage was soon picked up elsewhere – both by mainstream outlets and music sites. 

Multiple outlets across Europe carry a piece on the release by the news wire AFP that notes in the headline how U2 ‘slam Ice, Putin’. 

A review in Spain’s El País praises The Edge’s “powerful guitar riffs” and reckons that Bono appears to be back at top vocal form on the ‘The Tears of Things’.

Over at Le Parisien, the reviewer calls the material “furious and committed” and asks if, after the darkness of this collection, “there will be light”? 

Across the Atlantic, the news is covered in straight pieces by most of the major outlets, including NBC and CBS, as well as on the sites of music magazines like Rolling Stone. There’s a glowing review in USA Today, praising in particular the “layered harmonies” of the Ed Sheeran collaboration ‘Yours Eternally’. 

At the time of writing, there were only two full reviews from major British outlets.

The Telegraph gave the EP a four-star write up, with the paper’s critic calling it “their most political work in years” while there were also four stars on offer from The Guardian’s Alex Petridis who observed a “crispness that has been lacking in their 21st-century material”. 

If you still need to make your own mind up, you can listen to the songs here (or wherever you get your songs).