U2 Break a Nine-Year Silence With 'Carnaval de Luz'

U2 have released "Carnaval de Luz," their first full-length album of all-new material in nine years. The 12-song record arrives in the band's 50th anniversary year and closes with Dolly Parton's last recorded song.

"The past and me have got to break up," Bono sings in the verse that opens the record's title track. It sounds like a mission statement. The singer doesn't linger on it, but as any reader of U2 interviews this century knows, the band wrestles constantly with its legacy — the review likens it to Jacob wrestling the angel in "Bullet the Blue Sky." They overthink. Impatient fans have wanted to say: just put down your pencils and turn in your work, boys.

What kind of album is it?

It's imperfect, rewarding and interesting — a complicated "party album" loosely themed around Latin America's pre-Lent celebrations, following two EPs U2 released earlier this year tied to Ash Wednesday and Easter. The band carved the record out of amassed material by pulling together the songs that fit a carnaval theme.

"Putting the messy in the messianic (is) the job of the frontman," Bono quips in the "liner notebook" accompanying the album. There's messiness aplenty. The songs don't always cohere, but they contain hundreds of quotable, funny or deeply poetic lines — as if Bono penned a year's worth of TED talks about God, the devil, love, ego and shared humanity and fed them into a blender. Spanish phrases abound.

Does it rock?

Yes, by and large — less radio-conscious and tentative than the band's 2000s and 2010s output, and closer to the U2 of the '90s than a replication of '80s signatures. The hooky "La Reina" gets almost too close, sounding built on the template of "Even Better Than the Real Thing." The album opens with "Go (Carnaval de Luz)," reportedly inspired by Suicide but sounding like a punkier techno-"Pop," and ends with "Torn."

That closer is the Dolly Parton duet. Parton, in her final recording, takes the place Johnny Cash held on "Zooropa." She began the song as one about a love triangle before Bono retrofitted it into a ballad about a mother grieved by the division between two warring sons. Recorded three months shy of her deathbed, she belts in the final moments, and Bono meets her in a flawless blending of voices.

What about the lyrics?

The verdict depends on your tolerance for Bono at his most unbottled. "You and me are breaking news / Because the news can't break us" (in "Superficiality") earns a groan. But "No such thing as a small life… / Every life gigantic, huge and romantic / Even greater than it appears" (in "If the World Is at War We Better Not Be") lands as intended.

The review's closing judgment is blunt: whether with a final Dolly collaboration or Bono's stanza-by-stanza musings, no one does mortal reckonings better.