U2
Days Of Ash (Island)
Although there’s a new U2 album due later this year, this new, six-song digital-only release is more than a teaser of what’s to come. Days Of Ash, a standalone EP, is the most politically themed set of songs this band has created in quite a while, and the lyric videos which accompany these songs online are as powerful as they are emotive. The band’s long-running Propaganda magazine is also rebooted for this release, in digital form, and well worth reading: hopefully both mag and music will be available in physical form soon.
First up is American Obituary, an angry response to ICE’s fatal shooting of peaceful protester Renée Nicole Macklin Good in Minnesota: here, The Edge’s guitar is as brutal as The Clash in full flight with the chorus “I love you more than hate loves war” making an effective mantra. The slower-paced, almost Leonard Cohen-esque The Tears Of Things is one of the best songs this band has ever made – as urgent as it’s heartwrenching, with its lyrical tack finding David questioning the use of violence to defeat Goliath.
Song Of The Future, an upbeat ear worm with an unforgettable chorus, pays tribute to Iranian teenager Sarina Esmailzadeh, who lost her life during the Woman, Life, Freedom protests in Iran in 2022, and Wildpeace is a poem by Yehuda Amichai, read here by Nigerian artist Adeola Fayehun; its ambient backing was the co-creation of U2 and producer Jacknife Lee.
One Life At A Time was written for Palestinian Awdah Hathaleen, killed in the West Bank by an Israeli settler, and addresses the frustration of a conflict without an end in sight: it pulls similar emotional levers to early U2 classic Pride (In The Name Of Love). And finally, Yours Eternally, on which Ukrainian musician Taras Topolia and Ed Sheeran contribute to an uplifting, defiant fist-raiser. Taken as a whole, Days Of Ash proves U2 still have the ability to galvanise us, move us and shake us with their songs in a time of unbearable suffering.
words DAVID NOBAKHT
