U2 - Days Of Ash

America will rise

Against the people of the lie

“An immediate response to current events.” That's what U2 declared at the launch of “Days Of Ash.” The Irish band has resurfaced unexpectedly, three years after the umpteenth lackluster showing of “Songs Of Surrender,” with a six-track EP “inspired by the many extraordinary and courageous people fighting on the front lines for freedom.”

Given the premises laid out above, Bono and co. spend the whole record rowing toward a West sodomized by a lying, warmongering, classist ruling class, thus intersecting in no uncertain terms with the grimness of the present, starting with the opening “American Obituary,” and a situation that has become unsustainable and plain for all to see. The reference is to Renee Good, the activist and poet brutally and senselessly killed during a controversial ICE anti-immigration raid on January 7, 2026. And they do it with a song that brings the four Irishmen back to something at least approaching the glories of “All That You Can't Leave Behind,” perhaps the band's last album with a pop-rock charge still worth mentioning, before the great musical void that has, alas, marked them for the last twenty-five years, between insipid little tunes and damningly uninspired releases.

Renee Good born to die free

American mother of three

Seventh day January

A bullet for еach child, you see

The color of her eyе

Having drawn that first sigh of relief, the following "The Tears Of Things" does even better: it's a bittersweet acoustic ballad that swells melancholically in its second half, in which U2 invoke Mussolini, David and Michelangelo, for a hermetic invective that denounces, with newfound poetry, the atrocities perpetrated in Gaza.

"These tracks on the Ep couldn't wait; these songs were impatient to be released. They're songs of defiance and dismay, of lament," reads Bono's statement. Produced by the ever-reliable Jacknife Lee, who also appears directly among the featured guests on the interlude "Wildpeace" alongside electro-soul singer Adeola, "Days Of Ash" marks an unexpected return to form for U2.

Even though "Yours Eternally" closes things out mediocrely, in a manner reminiscent of recent Coldplay, propelled as it is by the same overused dreamy little guitars beloved by half the indie-pop universe, further padded out by contributions from Ed Sheeran and Ukrainian singer/soldier Taras Topolia of the band Антитіла (Antytila) -- who effectively prompted Bono to write the song's lyrics "in the form of a letter from a soldier on active duty, with a bold and mischievous spirit worthy of the Ukrainian one" -- "Days Of Ash" is, on the whole, a successful Ep. It's a work that follows in the footsteps of Bruce Springsteen's protest song "Streets of Minneapolis", but with a certain melodic inspiration that, given the Irish band's semi-comatose artistic state, ultimately amounts to a small but very welcome surprise.

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05/03/2026