U2 Revitalize Their Sound and Message on ‘Carnaval de Luz’

By Marcus Bennett

U2’s Carnaval de Luz is the Dublin band’s 16th full-length album and its first album of original material in nearly a decade. Jacknife Lee produced the record. It narrows the palette after 2017’s Songs of Experience, which credited nine producers and dispersed its songs across too many directions.

The 1988 documentary Rattle and Hum offers a useful frame. B.B. King chats with Bono, then 27, and reflects on his own position: “[People] say, ‘There he is, a 62-year-old — and what is he trying to do?'”

U2 formed in Dublin half a century ago, when its members were teenagers. In their thirties, their art-damaged rock began to “fuck up the mainstream.” In middle age, they reinvented themselves with “Beautiful Day,” and later “brute-forced Songs of Innocence onto your iPhone.” Their résumé includes multiplatinum Number One hits, instant sellout tours and household-name status.

What does ‘Carnaval de Luz’ change for U2?

It restores focus rather than replacing U2’s basic musical language, and the result is a record whose compactness lets the band’s familiar gestures carry more weight than they did on the diffuse 2017 album.

On Carnaval de Luz, each song is tight, punchy, memorable and melodic. Compared with the blues and U2’s legend-making hits, the sound is big, bright pop, with more silver linings than clouds and only a few minor keys. The production stays light enough for the band to sound most natural when it is not trying too hard.

The songs do not recall “Pride (in the Name of Love),” “One” or “Stuck in a Moment,” but U2’s signatures remain immediate. On “La Reina,” Bono croons “Nobody is alone but nobody knows that” and belts “Sing-a-ling the reggaeton.”

The Edge’s guitar echoes and chime across “Street of Dreams” and the introduction to “The Mirror Maker (Rosalía).” Adam Clayton’s bass stabs and undulates on “La Reina,” while Larry Mullen Jr. plays a propulsive, march-like rhythm on “Can’t Stop Us Now.”

The record’s central theme is blunt: it is not too late. Each major song applies that proposition to a different human pressure.

• “Go”: not too late to party.
• “Midnight Sunshine”: not too late to find God.
• “Torn”: not too late for empathy.
• “If the World Is at War We Better Not Be”: not too late to save a relationship.
• “Street of Dreams”: not too late to save the world.
• “Can’t Stop Us Now”: not too late, plain and simple.

Carnaval de Luz also connects the previously released EPs Days of Ash and Easter Lily into an ambitious conceptual arc. In the band’s spelling, Carnaval refers to Brazil’s colorful festival before Lent, with Ash Wednesday and Easter supplying neighboring markers.

Days of Ash featured the punk-rock song “American Obituary,” mourning the death of Renée Good at the hands of an ICE agent. It also included “The Tears of Things,” a Roy Orbison-like song that obliquely addresses the divide between Gaza and Israel.

“Easter Lily,” the stronger of the two EPs, featured “Song for Hal,” a classic-sounding U2 song about never feeling alone. The Edge sings, “You are not alone when you close your eyes.” “In a Life” brought traditional U2 drama and sparkling guitar. The final track, “Coexist,” ends with Carnaval’s opening analog-synth notes, restarting the cycle.

The deluxe edition makes the connection explicit by pairing the LP with both EPs. Taken as a whole, the songs offer an alternative to pop-culture doomsaying. U2’s message remains peace, hope and love, and the music is fun.

“Go” starts that mood. Nile Rodgers-style disco guitar, Suicide-inspired keys and abundant hooks form a dance-rock anthem. The lyrics say they “came to find other people who feel like this.” At under three minutes, the song also demonstrates the record’s economy.

“La Reina” and “Street of Dreams” borrow the spirit of Latin pop without becoming Latin pop, although “Street of Dreams” includes some hip-hop. Bono delivers universal truths: “Everyone is on their own, everybody knows that” on “La Reina,” and “Don’t you give up, and your dreams won’t give up on you” on “Street of Dreams.”

Bono may be drawing inspiration from Rosalía on “The Mirror Maker (Rosalía),” while the Edge is thinking of Pete Townshend, strumming big wind-milling chords on acoustic and electric guitars.

The strongest songs arrive near the end, and they are anything but quiet. “The Greatest Show on Earth,” the album’s best song, resembles the big singles on The Joshua Tree. Brian Eno, that album’s producer, assists the ambient soundscape. Its introduction begins like a Joshua Tree single before the Edge’s echoes shift out of phase, similar to Refused’s “The Shape of Punk to Come,” suggesting a new era.

Bono then turns the song toward love, aging and God. He asks, “Is this a church of love or fear?” and “Have we made God feel like a stranger here?”

“Glorify,” co-produced by Martin Garrix, turns on Bono’s repeated line, “They’re looking for you to glorify, glorify.” “Midnight Sunshine” works as a possible sex jam and an end-of-the-world party song. Bono’s lyric, “In the dark, we discover midnight sunshine,” leaves the setting open.

Carnaval ends with “Torn,” a country-ish duet with Dolly Parton in her final recorded vocal. The pairing recalls Johnny Cash’s appearance on Zooropa.

Like “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” which chronicled the division wrought by Ireland’s troubles decades earlier, “Torn” is not a “rebel song” but a humanitarian plea.

Parton sounds emotional and cracked, while Bono deepens his voice for gravitas as they describe “a family at war.” Neither singer calls out Republicans and Democrats, Catholics and Protestants, or any other ideologically divided people.

The aim is mutual understanding on a fundamental level before it is too late. That is U2’s answer to B.B. King’s question: they are still trying, and Carnaval de Luz makes the attempt sound immediate.

Its wager is straightforward. Peace, hope and love remain available if listeners accept the record’s central proposition: it is not too late.