This EP is so distressingly insufferable that I’m actually no longer sure if I’m still allowed to like U2’s earlier stuff, which is a shame, because it’s some of my favourite rock music ever made. The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby are easy top twenty albums for me: Unforgettable Fire and War top fifty; maybe even Zooropa is in there somewhere, despite broad sections of it being tiresomely avant garde. I recognise that Radiohead’s oeuvre is better, but they are opaque, miserable, Estuary English Geography postgrads who speak to my head and not to my soul, or at least not in the same way as the redemptive, pissed-up, sub-Christian Gaelic ecstasy of “Where The Streets Have No Name”, or the irony-drenched European electronica of “The Fly”, or even the thoroughly idiotic and barnstormingly brilliant “Discotheque.” I can do without U2’s post-2000 Dad Rock iteration, where they’re all standing around in airports on the album covers, and obviously I’m appalled and embarrassed by the recent identikit folk-rock errors of judgement that they forcefully upload to the phones of indifferent teenagers every few years…
…but this… this latest EP, Days of Ass or whatever the fuck it’s called, represents a new and injurious level of cringe which, in my naivete, I didn’t see coming and which I didn’t think possible. U2 started life as a punky – but always slyly corporate and mainstream – protest act with a witty, fun size, inordinately annoying frontman, and now, because the world is going to hell in a handcart, they think they can dust off the guitars and the sloganeering and essay some kind of “rallying cry” against the resurgence of “fascism”, and perhaps also avert a Third World War, rather than actively facilitating one by enhancing and justifying humanity’s collective urge toward self-destruction through mass exposure to their shit music.
This “anti-fascist” impulse underpins the E.P.’s opening track, “American Obituary”, in which a bunch of pompous heritage rock retirees appropriate a smattering of cliches that wouldn’t look out of place on the student union notice board of an understaffed polytechnic (“The power of the people is so much stronger than the people in power” ::puts fist in mouth::), and then set these half-baked “ideas” to anodyne Bon Jovi-like pop-punk that absolutely nobody under the age of 40 would so much as entertain the idea of listening to. Yes, admittedly, after this mortifying episode, the music briefly and very slightly improves. “Tears of Things” narrates a conversation between Michaelangelo’s David and an unfeeling God; “Song of the Future” conjures the shrill, surgical, trademark U2 guitar sound that was indeed interesting and distinctive half a century ago; but then it all speedily goes to shit again, there’s some spoken word poetry over an ambient backing track that’s more Blue Jam than Maya Angelou; and the fact that the closer, “Yours Eternally”, sounds exactly like early Coldplay is not, astonishingly, the worst thing about it – the unwelcome involvement of oafish mountain troll Ed Sheeran covers that particular base.
Obviously, there’s nothing remotely new or surprising about U2 making ass-cheek-clenchingly supine claptrap for sixty-year-old public sector workers who “dream of a better world” while eating cheese off a wooden board; they’ve inhabited that particular execrable role since the turn of the millennium. But what’s dazzlingly affrontive about Days of Ash is the antiquated, uninquiring character of its political messaging. 80 million people voted for Donald Trump and his unalloyed white nationalist agenda in 2024; nativist political parties are on the rise across the West; the so-called “establishment” is to some extent left-leaning, partly because it is spooked by the obviously economically suicidal implications of ethnocentrism. The situation is infinitely more concerning than the half-witted, feel-good teenage fairytale on offer here; of an aloof, authoritarian, unpopular ruling class deporting everybody versus the heroic multicultural masses who want to resist and can successfully do so through “people power.”
None of this quietly-horrifying social and cultural unravelling is adequately reflected in U2’s simple-minded and messianic sloganeering. Maybe a pop-rock record about the ongoing death struggle between identitarian particularisms of varying vintage vs a retreating universalist liberalism would be a bridge too far for the average Spotify subscriber. But it would surely be preferable to this predictable assortment of Davos Liberal-approved talking points (Minnesota, Iranian feminists, Palestinian activists), all neatly packaged in a veneer of pogoing post-punk protest that wasn’t particularly convincing in the early 80s, let alone in 2026.
Rating: *
Standout track: “The Tears of Things”