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Artist News Releases
U2 are going to release an album this year after all
By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 7 September 2017
Back in January, U2 guitarist The Edge said that the band had cancelled plans to release a new album this year, due to the election of Donald Trump.
It was a little sliver of light in some dark times, knowing that at least one good thing had come from that whole debacle. But now they’ve gone back on their promise and are planning to release a new album, ‘Songs Of Experience’, on 1 Dec. Assuming Trump hasn’t nuked us all to oblivion by then. We can only hope.
The sequel to 2014’s ‘Songs Of Innocence’ was all but finished at the point at which Trump was elected. But that event caused the band to go back into the studio and re-record some of it to address the current political situation.
In a new interview with the New York Times, Bono explains: “We needed some distance from it. The world had changed. We needed to put things on pause to take in the scale of the change”.
They didn’t, but whatever. Bonzo goes on: “The wickedness in the world, we just let it perforate the album. But it still had to be a very personal album, not a polemic. The elections were a shock to the system personally and a shock to the system politically, not just in America but in Europe. This is my lyrical response to both of those shocks. I leaned more on the personal than the political, but the political is there to put the personal songs in the context of time, of history”.
The band premiered the first song from the album, ‘The Blackout’, last month. Now they’re back with another, called ‘You’re The Best Thing About Me’:
