Carnaval De Luz: U2's 16th album argues for its own relevance

Carnaval De Luz is U2's 16th album, and 50 years into the Irish band's run it plays like a comeback rather than a monument. The record follows two recent EPs that an essay in the NPR Music newsletter calls renewal ceremonies, plus a run of singles that announced the band was "back on their old stomping grounds."

The stakes were structural. No major rock band has faced a more tumultuous twilight era, and chasing relevance had already produced spectacular mistakes. U2 kept making money while sliding toward the dreaded status of nostalgia act, and Bono, the most extroverted rock star since Mick Jagger, watched his children replace him in the celebrity pages while he tended to his health problems.

The verdict in that essay is deliberately hedged. Carnaval De Luz is "admirable again, if not exactly cool," and it works, on that telling, because the band can still startle, engage and generate happiness.

The mechanism is self-reference rather than nostalgia. The album clatters through U2's own history "like a self-referential version of Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits," and the details are specific. Opening track "Go (Carnaval De Luz)" starts on a wash of noise that points back to Achtung Baby's "The Fly." On "Silencio," the Edge's guitar against Adam Clayton's bass recalls "Two Hearts Beat as One," from 1983's War. "The Greatest Show on Earth" is a ballad in the band's Wim Wenders era, and "Glorify" shrinks the strut of 2004's "Vertigo" to fit a more direct invocation of grace.

Before the singles, the Edge had whispered about a "sci-fi Irish folk project." Beyond an uptick in the guitarist's noise generation, this is not an experimental record. What it has instead is time: a core commitment to the band's own historic innovations feeds an immediacy that feels earned rather than forced.

What does the Latin turn actually change?

It signals itself in the album's title and in "The Mirror Maker (Rosalía)," named for what the essay describes as Bono's latest platonic muse, the Spanish artist Rosalía. Her reported response, an amused "Do I have to sing on this?", suits a song in which the band admits it can barely touch the hem of her garment and gushes anyway. On the album's evidence, the Latin engagement lands less as awkward appropriation than as reinforcement of the Eurotrashy cosmopolitanism — the knowingly international pop of 1992's Achtung Baby — that the group introduced 34 years ago.

How much does the faith cost, and who is it for?

More than at any point since the 1990s, Bono's lyrics state Christian faith outright. "Street of Dreams" begins with the Psalm-ish "God, hear me shout." In "Glorify" he addresses those who reject the spiritual with the ultimate Jesus flex, snarling, "There's nothing you can do to keep me from loving you." "La Reina" adds an unnamed "face of the future" to his harem of divine feminine muses, and "Midnight Sunshine," a bubblegum soul number, turns on a pantheistic punchline: "You say God no longer cares for us / I say the stars are only there for us to shine."

Banal on the page, Bono's words gain the light they need from a melody that functions as a mnemonic tool or, yes, a prayer. The essay is candid about the limits. Casual fans who are not religious may sit uncomfortably with such fervor, and "Torn," apparently the last song Dolly Parton recorded, "pushes the limits of mawkishness" as it laments the loss of the ecumenical ideal. Even so, faith feels more urgent to Bono now than the lemon-squeezed earthly pleasure of his younger years. This is an older man's album, reflective and repentant.

How much of the record rests on the rhythm section?

A lot. Larry Mullen Jr. shows what expensive physical therapy can do by banging the drums with machine-gun force. Adam Clayton, the career-long secret weapon, brings Motown's bop and the bubbling syncopation of lovers rock — a Caribbean-derived pop style — as counterpoint to Mullen's drive and to Bono's impassioned declarations. Bono knows how to throw a phrase in Clayton's direction while the Edge creates static around both, so the heavier pronouncements fizz and shift their meanings.

That playfulness among bandmates is what keeps "The Mirror Maker (Rosalía)" from being a cringeworthy come-on and turns it into "a genuine expression of awe at a younger artist." Longtime studio allies Brian Eno and Jacknife Lee set the atmosphere, and the production stresses agility and fun rather than the big skies of the Daniel Lanois era or the Eno-helmed 2009 gem No Line on the Horizon.

What does the big ballad do with its grand gestures?

"The Greatest Show on Earth" is an homage to the illuminated cathedrals U2 makes of stadiums when it plays "With or Without You" on its world tours, and it carries enough antic energy to escape navel-gazing ponderousness. Bono's take on Peggy Lee singing "Is That All There Is," with Courvoisier in hand, meditates on the many marriages that make up a life, naming heartache and productive codependence. He may be talking to his wife, Ali, who has been with him as long as he has used his famous name. When he sings "Breathe on me and I'm love and I'm lust," the torch song becomes a soul invocation redolent of Aretha and the Sweet Emotions, with Clayton and Mullen narrowing the spotlight to pinpoints so Bono cannot settle too firmly into his own grandiosity.

What does this change for U2's standing?

It changes the category. Whether dumb luck or "Spidey sense" put the album's release right after the U.S. election midterms that solidified the return of liberal confidence, the record runs on similar energy, and humor is what makes its bolder messages palatable. Sometimes it takes the obvious form of wordplay, as when Bono quotes Ernest Hemingway's famous quip about his favorite cocktails in "Silencio," but mostly it lives in the music itself.

So the useful question is not whether U2 is cool. It is whether the band can convert one well-timed moment of political alignment into something durable. The evidence of Carnaval De Luz is that the machinery works again: the callbacks land, the rhythm section carries the weight, and a frontman with a fortune and a mission finds something to say. Whether the Latin-inflected, confessional mode survives past this moment is the next test.