What can we expect from a new U2 album?

Posted On June 6, 2025June 6, 2025

Every rock and roll band reaches that moment when they start questioning whether they have anything left to say. Most people who have been in the business for decades usually have some classics already under their belts, so there’s no point in putting out new records if they only serve to promote a tour to catch. But for every toothless band that has spent all of their creativity on making sure they can still play live, U2 have never stopped wondering what the next version of themselves will sound like.

From day one, the band never sought to make records within a formula every time they went into the studio. Their heroes were always the punk rockers who broke down barriers back in the 1970s, and every single one of their records has been focused on making something that either deliberately goes against the system or challenges people’s perception of what a U2 album is supposed to sound like.

That doesn’t mean that all of those experiments worked out beautifully. There are many people who would have preferred not to have Songs of Innocence clog up their iTunes library back in the day, and even Bono admitted that Pop was an example of them being completely out of their depth, but that doesn’t mean they should stop daring to take chances, either.

After all, Achtung Baby was one of the biggest chances that they could have taken when it was released, and, for a decade that should have killed them, the 1990s were especially kind to the band because of how much they were willing to douse themselves in irony and make something that took a few potshots at phoney rockstars. But after re-releasing some of their old stuff, there have been subtle hints about where the band’s looking to venture next.

So, where is U2 heading on their next record?

Then again, Bono has never been one to keep his mouth shut about his work. He has said that he wants to go back to the traditional rock and roll records that he heard from bands like AC/DC back in the day. Although that doesn’t necessarily work with the effects-laden approach that The Edge brings to every record, it’s not hard to see where Bono is coming from.

After working on the reissue of How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, the frontman seemed to have the fire back in him that he hadn’t shown in years, saying, “We spent a moment thinking about the past—but you do that because you need to understand where that desire to be heard came from. And then you can get to the present and to the future—because the sound of the future is what we’re most interested in.”

While a pure guitar record hasn’t been en vogue in decades, this era gives Bono an opportunity to show a bit more fury than before. A lot of their most abrasive records, like War, came from them lashing out at the political corruption happening around them. Moreover, given how vocal the band have been in their distaste for Donald Trump, perhaps some of that anger will be channelled into this new record the same way they had done on tracks like ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’.

If anything, this new guitar record allows the band to recharge their batteries and give the people what they want. The Songs of… series of albums proceeded to get more and more forgettable and seemed to be dragging its feet by the end of things. So, now that they are working together again and Larry Mullen Jr is back working with the group, perhaps this is the time for them to deliver another watershed cut. It’s in their nature to want to make something pioneering, but let’s hope this one will excite people like ‘Vertigo’ did back in the 2000s.

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