U2 Made an Album That You Won’t Be Able to Get on Your Phone

Still trying to figure out how to get that U2 album off your iPhone? Well, that won’t be the case with their next one. Bono revealed in an interview with The New York Times Magazine that the band is nearly finished with a new album, Songs of Ascent, but has no plans to release it. “We’re not putting this out, but I’m telling you it’s awesome,” Bono told the magazine before playing some of the songs and singing along. “There’s pure joy,” he said of one, called “The Bard’s Last Breath.” “It’s a ridiculous pop sort of Rubber Soul, isn’t it?” he told the reporter of another, called “Smile.” “They sound like U2 songs,” replied the Times reporter (one former Vulture writer David Marchese).

Bono clarified that the band “didn’t scrap” the album, “just held it.” Instead, they want to make “the most unforgiving, obnoxious, defiant, fuck-off-to-the-pop-charts rock ’n’ roll song that we’ve ever made.” Not just want to — “It’s our job!” he said he told the Edge, U2’s guitarist. Elsewhere in the interview, an ever-confident Bono manifested a collaboration with Robert John “Mutt” Lange, known for producing albums by AC/DC and Def Leppard. (Hey, better to have Bono talking about that than George W. Bush or Rupert Murdoch, among the people he defends in the interview and his memoir, Surrender, which he’s promoting.)

Whatever U2 releases next, it’ll be the band’s first music since 2017’s Songs of Experience. And Bono, of course, has high hopes. “I would not be surprised if U2 makes the best album of its life in the next years,” he said. “Not because the world needs it, but because the band might.” Maybe that’ll help him be a little less embarrassed of his band.