U2

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Essential Albums

  • All That You Can't Leave Behind
    All That You Can't Leave Behind
    All That You Can't Leave Behind

    The members of U2 headed into the 2000s in the midst of an existential crisis—not to mention a musical one. The band had both overwhelmed and underwhelmed fans with 1997’s would-be future-disco record Pop. Around the same time, the group’s PopMart tour was earning millions of dollars, but few accolades. Suddenly, the group’s cool cred was in doubt. Perhaps this was inevitable: After all, lead singer Bono had spent the decade simultaneously playing up and poking fun at rock ’n’ roll ludicrousness—only for him and his bandmates to share the stage with a giant, sporadically malfunctioning lemon. Bono had started the decade as a jokester, and ended it as a punchline. All That You Can’t Leave Behind was a self-conscious corrective—the sound of a band turning down the noise, throwing out the glittery props, and refashioning the old-school U2 sound into something more stripped-away and direct. To some, All That You Can’t Leave Behind was a bold return; to others, a bit of a retreat. Either way, it sold a gazillion copies, and erased any doubt of U2’s raw abilities (while also seemingly wiping clean any collective cultural memory of PopMart). U2 makes its intentions for All That You Can’t Leave Behind clear from the get-go with the opening track: “Beautiful Day,” a monstrous, undeniable bit of uplift, featuring an atomic guitar riff the Edge apparently recorded while strapped to a jumbo jet, and a gorgeous mid-song harmonic breakdown. “Beautiful Day” is so on-the-nose, so perfectly U2, that everyone forgave its sheer U2-ness. And the song demonstrated what 21st-century commercial rock could (and would) sound like in the years ahead: loud, proud, and only slightly ridiculous. That was certainly the mantra behind the album’s other smash-hit anthem, “Elevation,” a trampolining assortment of swan-diving guitars and sky-high vocals that manages to answer the age-old question: “Can a rock song rhyme the words ‘mole,’ ‘hole,’ and ‘soul,’ and still retain its integrity?” (The answer: Yes, but only in this instance.) But the roof-raising tracks on All That You Can’t Leave Behind are paired with (slightly) quieter, more carefully layered numbers. The reassuring ballad “Walk On” finds Bono doing what he does best as a lyricist—namely, taking off his shades, looking listeners directly in the eye, and giving them what feels like a one-on-one heart-to-heart. And the lovely “In a Little While,” a low-key bit of soul-searching, is one of the band’s most effectively pared-down numbers (it became a favorite of Joey Ramone in his final days). Still: All That You Can’t Leave Behind didn’t top the charts because of such quieter moments. This is an album custom-made for beautiful days, and no song sums up its powers greater than “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of,” a sumptuous, gospel-tinged heartbreaker that features a sing-along chorus to which even the most cynical U2 listener will eventually succumb. Is that song—much like the rest of All That You Can’t Leave Behind—a little too needy, too tidy, a little too desperate to be embraced? Sure. But after U2’s struggles in the late ’90s, at least this album—and its success—reminded the band members why they’d been so huge in the first place. Better to be stuck in a moment you can’t get out of than to be stuck inside a giant lemon.

  • Achtung Baby
    Achtung Baby
    Achtung Baby

    U2’s most transformative album—the one that would rejigger the band’s sound, re-energize its members, and win over even the band’s fiercest critics—began with a vague promise from Bono. On December 30, 1989, during a homecoming performance in Ireland, the U2 frontman bid farewell to the ’80s by declaring that his world-conquering band was taking a sabbatical from stardom. “We have to go away,” Bono announced, “and just dream it all up again.” The hasty retreat made sense, given the response to 1988’s highly hyped Rattle and Hum, an ambitious double album (and documentary film) that found U2 traveling through America in search of new sounds—and, to some observers, wallowing in self-seriousness. The band had always prompted its fair share of eye-rolling, but Rattle and Hum gave the group’s detractors even more ammo: Gospel choirs? Folk songs? Just who do these U2 guys think they are? The band members were wondering the same thing. So in 1990, they decamped to Germany, hoping the recent fall of the Berlin Wall could be the backdrop for a future-focused burst of creativity. Instead, the four band members—Bono, guitarist the Edge, drummer Larry Mullen Jr., and bassist Adam Clayton—began sparring in the studio, torn over what the ’90s version of U2 should sound like. The Edge, in particular, was fascinated by the noisy new wave of industrial artists like Nine Inch Nails and KMFDM—acts whose menace and aggression were far removed from U2’s brand of guitar-starred anthems. Not everyone was sold on the idea of a more aggro, less earnest version of U2. But the push and pull of the Achtung Baby sessions—which were later continued in Dublin—would result in 12 tracks of buzzsaw rock that sound as though they’d been created by a different band altogether. The album’s lead single, “The Fly,” is a grimy dance-floor come-on anchored by Clayton and Mullen’s strange new rhythms. And on “Mysterious Ways,” the Edge trades in his familiar clean-lined guitar-jangle for a hazy funk that sounds like it’s being played through a dial-up modem. As for Bono: He’s never been as loose as he is here—nor as libidinous. On both the kaleidoscopic “Until the End of the World'' and the clanging “Zoo Station,” he adopts a winking, playfully skeevy persona—the perfect guise for the ironic ’90s. Yet the clear-eyed bluntness that propelled U2 to infamy in the ’80s was still intact, most notably on “One,” a soulful ode to reconciliation that would become one of the biggest songs of U2’s career. Less than two years after U2 vowed to “dream it all up again,” Achtung Baby delivered on that big promise—maintaining all the vigor and fervor of the band’s early years, while flirting with sounds that would soon define radio: trip-hop, shoegaze, electro-pop. This album wasn’t Rattle and Hum—it was pure Sturm und Drang. And for once, the group’s most loyal fans—as well as its most exhausted critics—could agree: This souped-up, super-improved U2 2.0 was even better than the real thing.

  • The Joshua Tree
    The Joshua Tree
    The Joshua Tree

    100 Best Albums Shortly before U2 released what became one of the best-selling albums of all time, Bono thought about calling the record-pressing plant to stop production on it. Too many mistakes, he thought, too many wrong moves. He’d had this feeling before, of course—he later said he couldn’t figure out why anyone would even <I>buy</I> a U2 album. But the stakes were higher now: They’d already been crowned Band of the ’80s by <I>Rolling Stone</I> (in 1985, no less), and their live shows had become the kind of spectacles that inspired rapture. Add to this the anxiety that <I>The Joshua Tree</I> represented something new for the band: the gospel influences, the emotional nakedness, the introduction of understatement to a sound that had defined itself by its forthrightness. In the past, they’d let their songwriting be loose and in-the-moment—after all, planning would’ve been unpunk. Now they were exploring the liberations that come with constraint. Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders had told Bono he had an amazing voice. But if he was going to sing the way he was capable of singing—the way he so obviously wanted to sing—he’d have to buckle down and write words he really believed in. If you lean in close, you can pull apart the sound in layers: the wisps of guitar, the bits of pocket-watch percussion (“One Tree Hill”). But if you sit back, it sounds minimal and direct. The words point to romantic love (“With or Without You,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”) but also to the search for God and meaning—a reflection of the dualities they found in both gospel and the romanticism of Van Morrison and Patti Smith. The backdrop—the inky washes of sound, courtesy of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois—captures constant change, but the foreground—the march-like rhythms, the impassioned vocals—is steadfast and firm. They rock with the tools of their era, but they also tap into something eternal. The album’s original title was <I>The Two Americas</I>. But the spirit of travel and adventure remains, as does the spirit of being lost in a strange place and soaking in the beauty of the unknown. <I>The Joshua Tree</I> is the sound of the quest that leaves you transformed. 

  • The Unforgettable Fire
    The Unforgettable Fire
    The Unforgettable Fire

    By the mid-’80s, it had become clear to the members of U2 that War was over. That 1983 album had given the group an early taste of international fame—not to mention its first hit single, thanks to “New Year’s Day.” But the thrills of victory had been short-lived: After a lengthy stint on the road, bandmates Bono, the Edge, Larry Mullen Jr., and Adam Clayton returned to Ireland, unsure of where U2 could go next. All they knew was that the brittle, ear-bending guitar attack they’d perfected over several years was starting to bore them. In search of inspiration, the band members decamped to the 200-year-old Slane Castle, a vast and isolated space not too far outside Dublin, where they could try out ideas round the clock. They also decided to part ways with producer Steve Lillywhite—who’d overseen their first three efforts—and partner with Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno. Both men were unlikely recruits: By that point, Lanois had worked mostly with a series of well-regarded (but hardly world-beating) Canadian acts. The enigmatic Eno, meanwhile, had spent the early ’70s playing with art-glammers Roxy Music, and had recently been collaborating with the ever-daring Talking Heads. It was hard to imagine Eno listening to War—much less finding a common musical language with the guys who’d made it. But U2 needed to be pushed and prodded a bit. And Lanois and Eno—as producers, players, and in-studio philosophers—helped draw out the sounds that would define not only The Unforgettable Fire, but also U2’s future. During the Slane sessions, the group’s sucker-punching guitar approach was dialed back, as the Edge discovered an airier, more restrained guitar style (as announced by “A Sort of Homecoming,” the album’s gently urgent opening track). And while Bono’s lyrics remained bluntly to the point—never more so than on the MLK-adoring anthem “Pride (In the Name of Love)”—he allowed his songwriting to grow more diffuse, sometimes even abstract: The lulling “Promenade,” with its floating guitar chimes and synths, is one of U2’s all-time great love songs—a scribbled mash note of fleeting images and desires. Still, no song highlights U2’s baptism by Fire like “Bad,” a six-minute-long tale of addiction and affection—built on a simple but diabolically catchy Edge riff—that finds the band finally converting all of its raw aggression into panoramic passion. “Bad” would become a monster hit, especially on the road: The group’s 12-minute live rendition during 1985’s Live Aid would have marked that festival’s apex, had Queen not been waiting in the wings. And, like all the songs crafted with Lanois and Eno during the Unforgettable Fire sessions, it somehow gets louder the quieter it gets—and vice versa. The Unforgettable Fire wouldn’t be U2’s biggest album of the ’80s, but it remains its most important. The band members could easily have kept tapping into all the youthful fury that had fueled so much of their early work. Instead, they opted to twist and turn away, confident that listeners would follow along. And within the next few years, they’d redirect all of that anxious energy toward a new goal: conquering America once and for all.

  • War
    War
    War

    In early 1983, U2 lead singer Bono tried to predict how listeners would react to his band’s new album: War, Bono told a reporter, would feel like a “slap in the face.” It was almost an understatement, as pretty much everything about U2’s third record—from its opening drum-march to its politically agitated lyrics to its title—was steeped in confrontation. Thanks to early breakout hits like “I Will Follow” and “Gloria,” U2 had made a name for themselves. Now, they wanted to make a point. Working again with Steve Lillywhite, who’d helped shape the jagged-glory sounds of Boy and October, U2 headed into Dublin’s Windmill Lane Studios in 1982 with an arsenal of songs and no shortage of talking points. Bono and the other members of U2 (guitarist the Edge, bassist Adam Clayton, and drummer Larry Mullen Jr.) were young men in their twenties, a time when the world should have felt wide open. And yet the news was serving up one early-1980s disruption after another: violence in Northern Ireland. Unrest across Europe. And a seemingly constant threat of worldwide nuclear annihilation. U2 decided to address those dangers head-on, lyrically and musically. “Sunday Bloody Sunday” opens War with a wallop: a flurry of military percussion, stabbing guitar lines, and anguished electric violin squelch, all of which serve to amplify Bono’s fury and frustration about the Troubles in Northern Ireland. “New Year’s Day”—the album’s first single, and an unlikely chart-climber—employs tight harmonies and some aptly chilly piano lines in what must be the only international pop hit to be inspired by the Solidarity movement in Poland. And you don’t have to dig too deep to find Bono’s nuclear fears surging through “Seconds” (“Push the button and pull the plug/Say goodbye, oh, oh, oh”). Yet for all the real-world ferocity that creeps into War, the album also finds Bono slowing down to find solace in his faith: “Drowning Man,” an eerie and ethereal throwdown for God that takes the electric violin of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” into a gentler, dreamier direction. And the album’s closing number, “40,” which was recorded in a last-minute rush, takes inspiration from Psalm 40, and closed the band’s live shows for years to come. Faith, fear, politics—with War, the members of U2 pushed their hot-topic passions into the rock ’n’ roll discourse, and found that the more they turned up the volume, the more people wanted to listen (in the UK, War pushed Michael Jackson’s Thriller off the top of the charts). To listeners, War may have been a slap in the face. But to U2, it was a welcome kick in the ass—the record that pushed them to keep pushing.

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About U2

No band has embodied the fundamental belief that rock ’n’ roll can change the world quite like U2. As their late-’70s post-punk peers were intent on deconstructing rock music into shards of rhythm and discord, the Dublin quartet of Bono (vocals), The Edge (guitars), Adam Clayton (bass), and Larry Mullen Jr. (drums) redirected that wiry energy to more impassioned, altruistic use, transforming themselves into a generation-defining band that combined the idealistic fervor of The Clash with the game-changing pop-cultural omnipotence of The Beatles. On their 1983 breakthrough album, War, Bono emerged as alt-rock’s preeminent preacher man, his wailing voice embodying the futility of The Troubles on the raging “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” But upon enlisting producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois on 1984’s The Unforgettable Fire, U2 traded in punk-schooled fury for celebratory civil rights anthems (“Pride (In the Name of Love)”) and slow-burn rapture (“Bad”), a transition that reached its apex on 1987’s The Joshua Tree (also produced by Eno and Lanois). With The Edge’s slashing style giving way to rippling textures, the album’s heart-racing hymns (“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” “Where the Streets Have No Name”) imbued U2’s arena-sized ardor with a spiritual grace, lending The Joshua Tree a universal appeal that made it one of the top-selling albums of the decade. Comfortably nestled on their perch as the most popular rock band in the world, U2 only seemed to get bigger and bolder: 1991’s Achtung Baby incorporated Bowie-esque character shape-shifting and influences from dark alternative rock and jagged industrial, while 1993’s Zooropa was a daring exploration of post-rave rhythms and electronic textures. Both albums bookended the groundbreaking Zoo TV tour, which redefined the stadium spectacle as a sensory-overloading, multimedia extravaganza—and presaged U2’s subsequent larger-than-life concerts, including the irony-laden PopMart Tour and the dazzling, cutting-edge visuals at the Sphere in Las Vegas. But no matter where their musical curiosities have led them and no matter how elaborate their stage shows have gotten, the members of U2 have never lost sight of their inspirational mission. Post-millennial highlights like 2000’s All That You Can't Leave Behind—an album that spawned classic anthems like “Beautiful Day” and “Walk On”—and 2017’s “You’re the Best Thing About Me” soundly reasserted U2’s power to unify and elevate, while 2023’s strident “Atomic City” celebrated bright futures by nodding to the band’s youthful punk roots.

FROM
Dublin, Ireland
FORMED
1976
GENRE
Rock

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