Adam Clayton is back at the center of U2’s latest release, and so is Larry Mullen Jr, who returned to the drum stool after medical issues. The band has put out Carnaval de Luz, its first album of new songs in nearly a decade, and it is being framed as a sharper, more joyful record than recent work.
Bono said the return to loud guitars was meant to create “a more defiantly joyful feel to take on these anxious times.” That is the clearest signal of what U2 is trying to sell here: not nostalgia, but a direct reset for a 16th studio album that wants to sound purposeful.
Brian Eno on Opener Go
Opener Go (Carnaval de Luz) leans on electronically treated guitars, a pounding rhythm and Brian Eno’s synths, which gives the album an immediate pulse instead of the soft-focus polish that can flatten comeback records. For listeners, that means the first track is doing more than opening the set list; it is setting the terms for how the album wants to be heard.
If the World Is at War We Better Not Be reaches back to 1976, when Bono remembers the band’s beginnings at Mount Temple comprehensive school in Dublin. That move pulls the release into a longer arc, but it also keeps the focus on the present tense rather than on a museum-piece version of U2.
The Mirror Maker and Rosalía
The Mirror Maker turns into a call-and-response tribute to Rosalía, while the lyrics in the album keep moving between light, faith and anxiety. Bono’s lines on Go — “A carnival of light / Illumination is the way to fight this.” — point to the record’s intended mood more clearly than any marketing copy could.
The review’s harder read is that U2’s last 20 years have been marked by turbulence when the creative planets no longer align, and that the band tried going more pop, becoming more experimental, touring The Joshua Tree again and reworking old songs for Songs of Surrender. Nothing in that stretch matched Boy, Achtung Baby or Zooropa, which is why this return to confidence matters as much as the album itself.
U2 after 20 years
U2 sounds rejuvenated and brimming with confidence on Carnaval de Luz, but that verdict comes with a catch: the group has spent 20 years chasing the level it reached earlier in its run. This album gives Adam Clayton and the rest of the band a cleaner commercial story than the one they have had for much of the last two decades, yet the real test is whether the energy holds across the full record rather than in the reviewed songs alone.
