U2’s New Song: A Review & Its Haunting Story

You can also listen to the review in an audio version.

“The best feeling in the world is freedom,” said Iranian YouTuber Sarina Esmailzadeh in one of her videos. A 16-year-old high school student yearning to live like her peers in the West took part in a protest in the city of Karadz in September 2022 after school. Members of the Iranian morality police beat her to death on the spot with repeated blows to the head.

Since then, the murder of the teenage girl has been overshadowed by the tens of thousands of victims who were massacred by the theocratic regime, especially at the beginning of this year. Nevertheless, the girl did not fall into oblivion. At a time when the US is moving its air and naval forces towards Iran, the rock band U2 is now reminding her. “So alone / And yet not alone / We’re not alone / Sarina, Sarina / You’re the song of the future,” frontman Bono sings on Song of the Future.

The Irish quartet, who will celebrate their 50th anniversary this year, released a new mini-album called Days of Ash this Wednesday without warning. It consists of five songs and one poem. All of them relate to current events in the USA, Israel, Iran, Sudan or Ukraine. “The songs on this EP couldn’t wait. They’re songs of defiance and dismay,” the singer stated.

With guitarist The Edge, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr., they have been involved in politics since time immemorial. “When we were eighteen, U2 first tried their hand at activism at an anti-apartheid concert at Trinity College Dublin,” Bono recalled last year in an article where he dated his interest in social events to his teenage years in the turbulent 1960s. “We longed for freedoms we didn’t have: political freedom, religious freedom, and most of all sexual freedom,” he summed up the outlet they were left with as they evolved musically.

Starting out under the influence of the punk-rock genre and names like The Clash, the group developed into one of the biggest pop-rock bands in the world in the 1980s and 1990s. To date, U2 have sold over 175 million albums, won 22 Grammy awards. And apparently they have not stopped believing that they can change something for the better with their music, as others managed to do in the 60s.

They still play songs like Sunday Bloody Sunday about the Northern Irish massacre called Bloody Sunday, Seconds about nuclear weapons, New Year’s Day about the Polish Solidarity movement, Miss Sarajevo about the war in Yugoslavia or Pride (In the Name of Love) about the leader of the African-American civil rights movement Martin Luther King. During their only Prague concert in 1997, when they performed at the Strahov Stadium under a giant yellow arch parodying the McDonald’s sign, Bono dedicated this song to Czech President Václav Havel.

For decades, U2 has collaborated with human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and supported political prisoners. Those who have experienced them know that at concerts the singer often preaches about hope, love, tolerance and compassion. Bono, who was in Prague again for a meeting of the International Monetary Fund in 2000, also described his struggle for debt forgiveness for the poorest countries in his recently published autobiography in Czech.

However, musically, U2 have slowed down lately. They’ve been performing minimally since 2019, when they wrapped up The Joshua Tree’s giant widescreen anniversary tour. It was only possible to see them at a series of concerts in the super-modern Sphere building in Las Vegas. They performed there behind the world’s largest LED screen. And for the first time in decades, drummer Mullen Jr was missing, as he had to undergo surgery.

Meanwhile, they re-recorded older songs only under the name Songs of Surrender. Bono published a book autobiography, subsequently based on it he devised a one-man show on New York Broadway and a documentary film. But U2 released only two new songs in almost a decade: Your Song Saved My Life for the soundtrack to the animated film Sing 2 and the single Atomic City, released for the Sphere in Las Vegas.

Not only in this respect, the novelty of Days of Ash is unexpected. Compared to their previous grandiose projects, it feels low-key and was clearly created in a hurry – the singer wrote the lyrics to the opening song American Obituary only last month. Like Streets of Minneapolis by Bruce Springsteen, this song with its explosive chorus and almost punk rock drive reacts to the murder of American citizen Renée Good by federal agents in Minneapolis, USA.

A song full of turns like “America will rise / Against the people of lies” feels a little too straightforward and wordy at times. The cheesy refrain “I love you more / Than hate loves war” is softened perhaps only by the realization that Bono is singing it from the point of view of this mother to her three children. The frontman, whose mother died in his teens, framed the song with a dialogue with God. She does not blame him for not preventing the tragedy. Precisely because I believe, I am interested in the fate of others, says Bono between the lines.

More successful is the urgent ballad with a distinctive atmosphere, The Tears of Things, in which bass, drums and electronic effects are gradually added to the acoustic guitar, until it culminates spectacularly with Edg’s solo on the electric guitar.

Conceived perhaps as a dialogue between the Renaissance artist Michelangelo and his statue of David, the song expresses the belief that “things themselves cry”. It refers to the thesis of the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr that if we do not hesitate to shed tears, or rather to show compassion, it can change us for the better and make us feel cohesive with others. At the same time, Bono warns against holy wars with references to the fascist Benito Mussolini or the attitudes of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust. The song ends with a quote from the biblical Moses, idealistically calling for freedom from violence.

The theme of young men who in the name of God allow themselves to be carried away to violence also freely passes into the third track Song of the Future dedicated to the murdered Iranian student. The second half of the EP, however, is no longer very distinctive: neither the song One Life at a Time directed against Israeli extremist settlers, nor the closing pop song Yours Eternally conceived as a letter from a Ukrainian soldier from the front, to which guest pop star Ed Sheeran answers with his voice.

Everything is complemented by an ambient background to a poem by the late Israeli-German author Yehuda Amichai. When listening to it, it’s hard to imagine that Days of Ash would be remembered by anyone except the most loyal listeners in a few years.

For them, the group also revived the fan magazine Propaganda, which was sent out by post in the 1980s. In the new digital issue, drummer Larry Mullen Jr. describes, among other things, how he wasn’t sure if he would return to music after the surgery. And how strange it was to watch my band in Las Vegas with a spare drummer. “It was like an out-of-body experience,” he compares, describing how he had to learn how to sit and play the drums differently after the surgery. The good news is that you can’t tell from the result.

The new EP does not contain any hits, as U2 last had in 2004 with How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. Even after three days, the songs did not enter the hit parade on the Spotify platform, where Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny dominates the ten most listened to songs. His likable appearance in the Super Bowl final of the American football league had many times more impact as a gesture of resistance to the American president Donald Trump.

But maybe the Irish didn’t have such ambitions this time. And they simply wanted to quickly get rid of the songs that are not suitable for the upcoming full-length album, which according to Bono will finally be released this year.

On the fourth anniversary of the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, however, U2 deserves credit for continuing to support the defending country. The closing track Yours Eternally features, among others, the voice of Ukrainian musician and soldier Taras Topolia, with whom Bono and Edge performed in a Kyiv metro station in May 2022 as people took shelter from Russian bombing.

In the accompanying magazine, the singer explains the meaning of this war to the Irish. “Ask people in East Germany, Poland or Latvia if they think Putin is going to stop in Ukraine. He could easily find an excuse to invade Ireland if it suited him,” warns Bono. And at the age of sixty-five, he expresses disappointment at where the world has come to. “Although all the horror is starting to seem normal to us on our small screens, we live in crazy and unbearable times. They are not normal at all. We have to face this so that we can believe in the future and in each other again,” he appeals.

The Irish band released the album Days of Ash, translated as Ash Days, on Ash Wednesday, when believers are supposed to turn their attention from ephemeral matters to lasting values. So, U2 above all tell us that the most important things are love, compassion – and defiance of injustice.