Eight songs into U2’s new album, and there it is: the silvery whir of Edge’s electric guitar, echoing endlessly as Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. lock into a driving groove and Bono begins singing about how “love is the hardest and easiest thing.”
More than any other passage on “Carnaval de Luz,” released Friday, the beginning of “The Greatest Show on Earth” is immediately identifiable as the work of these four veteran musicians — and clearly an affirmation, 50 years after they formed the band, that they still have it.
Except wait: what is Bono singing when he gets to the chorus of the song?
If this is love, don’t act surprised when you’re hurt
Even if our dreams are in the ground
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 album, an honest and 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 not have seen the light of day: After touring the world to celebrate the 30th anniversary of “The Joshua Tree,” Mullen was in such poor physical condition (due to a long-standing neck injury) that he didn’t participate in U2’s residency at the Las Vegas Sphere in 2023 and 2024. And even if the drummer was able to play — a necessary prerequisite, his bandmates said, for the band to make a record — it’s not like 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 risky surgery; Back as a quartet, U2 found enough inspiration from various global scandals – Gaza, Ukraine, the state-sponsored murder of Renée Good – to release a few surprise EPs earlier this year.
Having worked on an animating fury, “Carnaval de Luz” aims for what Edge called a “defiant joy,” which, I’m sorry to say, makes for some deeply embarrassing lyrics.
“I see a summer on the road of songs and a sea of silver,” Bono sings in “Can’t Stop Us Now,” “Where the rainbow refuses gold, and it’s revolutionary.” In “Superficiality,” he proclaims, “You and I are making the news because the news can’t break us.” ” (Brother.)
Yet what stands out is U2’s sincere belief that these songs matter — that the band has something to offer a world in crisis, even if that something is just a right, 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 – lithe and sensual but with just the right amount of desperation – which bodes well for the band’s 2027 stadium tour.
The realization of the “Carnival of Luz” is an emotional state between nostalgia and thirst; the music seems to know more about life (and death) than it actually says, at least until album closer, “Torn.” Recorded shortly before Dolly Parton’s death in August, it’s a moving but unflowery duet between her and Bono about a mother who doesn’t know how to reconcile her warring sons.
The beauty of the song lies in its intertwined vocals; his wisdom lies in his acceptance that no solution is assured.
Gn entert
