Eight songs into U2’s new album, and there it is: the silvery thrum of the Edge’s electric guitar, echoing into infinity as Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. lock into a driving groove and Bono starts crooning about how “love’s the hardest easy thing.”
More than any other passage on “Carnaval de Luz,” which dropped Friday, the beginning of “The Greatest Show on Earth” is instantly identifiable as the work of these four veteran musicians — and clearly an assertion, 50 years after they formed the group, that they’ve still got it.
Except, hold on: What’s that Bono sings when he gets to the song’s sweeping chorus?
If this is love, don’t act surprised when you get hurt
Even if our dreams lay in the dirt
We were once the greatest show on Earth
Stuck in a moment you can get out of — that’s the spirit of U2’s 16th studio LP, a grippingly honest if typically idealistic meditation on the value of a rock ’n’ roll band at the end of history.
The quartet’s first album of new songs in nearly a decade, “Carnaval de Luz” might easily have not happened: After touring the world to celebrate the 30th anniversary of “The Joshua Tree,” Mullen was in such bad shape physically (thanks to a long-standing neck injury) that he sat out U2’s residency at the Las Vegas Sphere in 2023 and 2024. And even if the drummer was able to play — a necessary precondition, his bandmates have said, for the group to make a record — it’s not as though anyone was clamoring for one after the increasingly tedious “Songs of Innocence”/“Songs of Experience”/“Songs of Surrender” project.
But then Mullen met a young neurosurgeon willing to perform a risky surgery; back together as a foursome, U2 found enough inspiration in various global outrages — Gaza, Ukraine, the state-sponsored killing of Renée Good — to bust out a couple of surprise EPs early this year.
Having worked through an animating fury, “Carnaval de Luz” aims for what the Edge has called “defiant joy,” which I’m sorry to say yields some deeply embarrassing lyrics.
“I see a summer down the road of songs and a silver sea,” Bono sings in “Can’t Stop Us Now,” “Where the rainbow refuses the gold, and that’s revolutionary.” In “Superficiality,” he proclaims, “You and me are breaking news because the news can’t break us.” (Bro.)
Yet what comes through is U2’s earnest belief that these songs matter — that the band has something to offer a world in crisis, even if that something is just a righteously crunchy guitar riff, as in “La Reina” and the title track, or a soaring vocal melody like those in “Superficiality” and “The Greatest Show on Earth.” Indeed, Bono sounds better here than he has in years — supple and sensual but with just the right touch of desperation — which bodes well for the band’s 2027 stadium tour.
The achievement of “Carnaval de Luz” is an emotional state somewhere between nostalgic and thirsty; the music seems to know more about life (and death) than it actually says, at least until the album’s closer, “Torn.” Recorded shortly before Dolly Parton’s death in August, it’s a stirring yet unflowery duet between her and Bono about a mother who has no idea how to get her warring sons to reconcile.
The song’s beauty is in its intertwined voices; its wisdom is in its acceptance that no fix is assured.
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