U2 release new politically charged EP ‘Days of Ash,’ say new album will be out later this year

“Who needs to hear a new record from us?,” drummer Larry Mullen Jr rhetorically asks in the press release for U2‘s new EP, which they surprised the world with just now. “It just depends on whether we’re making music we feel deserves to be heard. I believe these new songs stand up to our best work. We talk a lot about when to release new tracks. You don’t always know… the way the world is now feels like the right moment. Going way back to our earliest days, working with Amnesty or Greenpeace, we’ve never shied away from taking a position and sometimes that can get a bit messy, there’s always some sort of blowback, but it’s a big side of who we are and why we still exist.”

U2’s new EP Days of Ash is their first release of new songs in nine years, featuring five new songs and a poem, all politically charged, and including collaborations with Ed Sheeran, Jacknife Lee, and more

Says Bono: “It’s been a thrill having the four of us back together in the studio over the last year… the songs on Days of Ash are very different in mood and theme to the ones we’re going to put on our album later in the year. These EP tracks couldn’t wait; these songs were impatient to be out in the world. They are songs of defiance and dismay, of lamentation. Songs of celebration will follow, we’re working on those now… because for all the awfulness we see normalized daily on our small screens, there’s nothing normal about these mad and maddening times and we need to stand up to them before we can go back to having faith in the future. And each other.”

You can listen to the Days of Ash EP below.

There’s also an accompanying issue of U2 zine, Propaganda, titled “Six Postcards From The Present… Wish We Weren’t Here” that features band interviews, song lyrics and more. Check that out here.

Next week U2 will release a documentary short, Yours Eternally, on February 24 to mark the fourth anniversary of Russia invading The Ukraine.

Days of Ash
1. American Obituary
2. The Tears of Things
3. Song of The Future
4. Wildpeace – by Yehuda Amichai, read by Adeola, with music by U2 and Jacknife Lee.
5. One Life At A Time
6. Yours Eternally (ft. Ed Sheeran & Taras Topolia)