U2 have spoken to NME about the “defiant joy” of their new album ‘Carnaval de Luz’, the secrets of sticking together after 50 years, “failing the mainstream”, and how their love of Fontaines D.C., Rosalía and Lambrini Girls keeps them in the game.
NME met Bono and The Edge in their London hotel on the afternoon of Guy Fawkes Night, just a couple of days after their intimate album launch show for the BBC at The Tate Modern. While in a similar celebratory spirit to recent homecoming gigs in Dublin marking the band’s 50th anniversary, this career-spanning set in the South Tank was filmed against a 360 degree backdrop of the artwork ‘77 Million Paintings’ by Brian Eno, as the Irish stadium giants paid tribute to their longstanding collaborative relationship with the musician and producer.
“He encouraged us to deconstruct our band and our arrangements,” The Edge told NME about what first brought U2 into Eno’s universe, remembering how he encouraged them to relax and “build something from nothing” with early demos for their classic 1984 album, ‘The Unforgettable Fire’. “That was the first exploration and celebration of our limitations, and seeing them not as impediments but things to be explored in a positive way.”
It’s a spirit that remains with U2 today, with Eno still having a hand in their Jacknife Lee-produced 16th album ‘Carnaval de Luz’. After ordering “a nip” of whiskey for the three of us (Bushmills Black Bush, the Protestant tipple of his late Irish Catholic father) Bono pulled out his phone to play ‘The Slave’ by Trinidadian calypso legend Mighty Sparrow, a recent discovery under recommendation of bassist Adam Clayton.
The frontman and guitarist then recalled their memories of hedonistic trips to carnivals in Nice, Gran Canaria and Santa Cruz. “We had Quincy Jones take us to carnival like he was taking us to rob a bank,” remembered Bono of a trip where they got roped into a jam session with a passing float. “He said, ‘I’ll take you to the source of carnival in Bahia’. We thought, ‘This is a real adventure’.”
The Edge – who wanted had the ideal for 1991’s seminal ‘Achtung Baby’ to be called ‘Carnalville’ – explained how they’ve always been “very conscious of the fact that we were fucking cheated out of carnival by the Catholic Church in Ireland”.
“We got fucking pancakes instead,” he laughed, but the marriage of escapism, partying and politics has always been at the heart of U2. “A lot of carnival was taking the piss out of the landed gentry and the royals. They would mock their costumes and their dancing,” added Bono, pointing to times in history when the celebrations were banned in certain Catholic countries. “Isn’t that amazing? That these big autocrats are frightened of carnival, of freedom? That’s fascism really.”
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That larger than life spirit and need for “defiant joy” is what drives the band’s effervescent new album ‘Carnaval de Luz’, fittingly launched with the skyward single ‘The Greatest Show On Earth’. The track lends itself to a stadium tour of the same name next year, but some hardcore fans may recognise the title from a sign that Bono found himself in front of on U2’s 1992 NME cover when we caught them in Miami on their globe-shaking ‘Zoo TV’ tour.
“That is prophetic,” said The Edge as we presented them with a copy of the magazine. “It will be prophetic for reasons that you don’t know,” smiled Bono looking down at his younger self with slicked-back jet black hair and shades. “I haven’t changed a bit!”
And how will they give the world ‘The Greatest Show On Earth’ once again? “With the history of showbusiness and shamanism, no less,” replied Bono.
Check out the rest of our interview with the frontman and the guitarist below, as they tell us about their “messy, sacred, defiant, luminescent, and unreasonable” new album, how true collaboration is the glue of all great bands and what the world could learn from that, America “waking up”, and the new generation of artists that have what Bono calls “the other stuff”.
NME: Hello Bono and The Edge. It’s been nearly 10 years since your last album. At this stage of your career, how frightening is the blank page?
The Edge: “I love it. There’s nothing daunting to me about that. My happy place is play and experimentation.”
Bono: “Me too. We do certainly have limitations, but one of them isn’t fear of the blank page. I know that can put people into real paralysis. You can have it as a writer if you have to fit into a specific rhythm and cadence. What I would say to writers is: ‘Whatever you’re feeling in that moment, it will always unlock the door’. If you feel as if you have nothing to say, that’s the first line that you write. ‘I have nothing to say,’ is a great opening line.
“Or ‘It is 15:15 on 5 November and I am pretending it’s 4pm for reasons I don’t need to explain’. The songs are there: rhyming numbers, the scent of whiskey, bringing politics into whiskey. Everything you need is under your feet and around you. That’s what a band is. A band is that statement. If not, you go and find the right musicians.
“It’s all there. They happen to be in your school, they happen to be next door. There’s one trapdoor, though. Speaking of Lou Reed and Delmore Schwartz who taught him literature and wrote ‘The ego is always at the wheel’. It is, and that’s OK. We need our egos, but your ego can get in the way of you asking the person next to you if they can help you solve this problem. A band is solving each other’s problems. I might be getting a little ‘self-help’ here, but it’s collective ego.”
The Edge: “A band is a cooperative. The essence of cooperation is, ‘You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’. That’s what a good band does. A good band all look out for each other and realise, ‘If I can help my bandmate win, then he can help me win, and what happens? We all win!’ You do have to sublimate your ego into this band ego. That’s not scoring points against each other. It’s coming together to score points.”
Bono: “‘If you scratch my back, I’ll shave your moustache!’”
The Edge: “Unfortunately right now, we seem to be at a very low ebb of social cohesion, trust between different groups, and this ability to argue from a position and realise that just because you have a difference of opinion with someone, that doesn’t make them evil.”
Bono: “Woah, woah, woah, woah! Now you’re going too far. There is some evil out there, Edge.”
The Edge: “Of course there is, but that’s not the point. The point being that cooperation is so important, and it’s never been more important to understand why it’s so fundamentally beneficial – on a small scale or a big scale.”
Which brings us to why we need a carnival?
Bono: “Exactly!”
The Edge: “Yes, a reset.”
The world is a very different place since 2017’s ‘Songs Of Experience’. What kind of compulsion did you feel to make this record, and what did you imagine the purpose would be of a U2 record in 2026?
Bono: “Utility! He’s stumbled onto utility.”
The Edge: “We always make music for what we would want to hear and see, and what’s going to help us. We always put ourselves in the audience at some mythical show. From that perspective, it’s almost self-serving initially and then we hope others will get something from it too.”
Bono: “But I think Andrew is getting at something else: utility, which is a word that can offend artists, but not us because we, particularly the two of us who have talked about it quite a lot even in the past weeks. Actually because of playlists and functionality. Brian Eno, ‘Music For Airports’, utility. ‘Music For Films’, dance music, it’s utility, and I am not frightened by that.
“Rock n’ roll music, punk rock, or ‘vertical dance music’ I would call it, then there is music for reflection. There’s music to protest with. Dan Savage was an AIDS campaigner who said, ‘In the morning we bury our dead, in the afternoon we protest for there to be less dead to bury, then in the evening we go out to dance, because the dance was what we were fighting for’. This was San Francisco in the middle of the ‘80s.
“I love that idea, ‘The dance is what we were fighting for’. Edge has been repeating this phrase ‘defiant joy’ a lot and I like it, but there is a moment for ‘The Days Of Ash’, there is a moment to protest, and there is a moment for anger and rage, ‘American Obituary’, whatever, and then there’s a moment where you just want to dance.
“I was saying the other day, and this is a slightly convoluted place to take this but I’m going to, but the Vietnam war, I was thinking about Edwin Starr’s ‘War! Huh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothin’! Say it again! War!’ That’s protesting the Vietnam war, and The Supremes put out ‘Stop in the name of love, before you break my heart, think it over’ – it’s a love song. Both have their impact, both have utility, both are defiant. As we say, again and again, the essence of romance is defiance.”
The Edge: “The big enemy right now is despondency.”
Bono: “Ooh, another D word.”
The Edge: “If you end up succumbing to the kind of negative narratives that are out there, a lot of them are self-creating through your algorithms. We are all capable of doom-scrolling and because we have a negativity bias, that’s what we end up getting dealt all the time, just the baggage. There’s something about communal gatherings where it’s a chance to reset, it’s a chance to go, ‘We are able to start a process of reimagining the future together’. When we cooperate and when we move forward, we can actually get some great stuff done.
“We just saw the midterms, we’re starting to see America waking up. As somebody said, ‘America will do the right thing when they’ve exhausted all other options’. Here we are, they’re coming back and that’s great to see. That mood is important. Defiant joy is the sense that the future is something we can co-author, and not to give in to this doom-mongering.”
There is the Trojan Horse aspect to U2. If you’ve been selling out stadiums for four decades then you know your music is going to reach a mass audience regardless. Tell us about that pressure of the impact that you can have on the mainstream and what you’ve tried to do this time?
The Edge: “We disregarded anything that was an agenda at first. We literally just enjoyed making music. Bono and myself in particular did a lot of work towards projects that weren’t initially going to be U2. We worked with Brian without knowing if that was going into the album, we worked with Johnny McDaid [Snow Patrol], we worked with Ed Sheeran, which led us eventually to work with Dolly Parton [on her final recording, ‘Torn’].
“Really, we were just concentrating on making music that meant a lot to us. Really, it’s only know when the album is delivered that we can start to think about how we explain it.”
Bono: “I’m much more cynical than Edge, so I would be thinking about those things. I would say that there’s a part of me that felt that we failed the mainstream with our last two albums [‘Songs Of Innocence’ and ‘Songs Of Experience’]. You only have a certain amount of agency with that audience. The perfect song, the perfect punk rock song for instance, it is my drug of choice.
“We went in on those two albums and wrote really great songs, we just couldn’t find a cohesive sound to those two albums. The songs were great and the thematics were right. Though they weren’t autobiographical and I don’t know if this is a contradiction, but they weren’t self-indulgent. But that doesn’t matter, because people just feel things.”
The Edge: “We’re working towards self-indulgence though!”
Bono: “We got to it, that’s the point! When we’d given up on the mainstream, we got the ‘Carnaval de Luz’, [and sister EPs] ‘Days Of Ash’, ‘Easter Lily’. Who’s going to buy that? ‘Song Of The Future’ I would say is a perfect pop song, but it’s next to ‘Tears Of Things’. They’re both protest songs.
“We weren’t going to promote so we’re handing this off, then we do the same with the Easter transcendent idea that Easter offers the gift of transcendence. We grew up on that kind of music. Whether it was Joy Division, Bruce Springsteen or Patti Smith. We didn’t think we’d get a song on the radio, and then ‘Silencio’ arrives. It’s the perfect two-and-a-half punk song.
“We don’t know if enough people play U2 on the radio any more. Are people even interested in radio? For those two albums, it was hard to give up that idea. Maybe it’s just not for us anymore. That’s been taken away from us, that opportunity, and we just let it go. We get into the sandpit. We’re like kids with Brian Eno again as soon as we start making this mess. It all coagulates and the pieces start to fit with this idea of carnival, which we’ve always carried around with us.”
In terms of servicing the mainstream, you’ve got a band like Fontaines D.C. playing these huge stadium shows next year…
Bono: “It’s incredible to see them doing stadiums, they’re so great.”
It’s often said that they’re now ‘the biggest Irish band since U2’. Do you welcome them coming for your throne?
The Edge: “We’re huge fans of theirs.”
Bono: “It all should make you up your game. Bands make each other better if they’re any good. I can’t imagine The Beatles being as good as they were without The Stones, I can’t imagine The Stones being as good as they are without The Beatles. Paul [McCartney] writes ‘Let It Be’ then they put out an album called ‘Let It Bleed’, you know, ‘All You Need Is Love’ and then ‘Street Fighting Man’. In the ‘90s you had Blur and Oasis. You make each other better. I will admit that when you hear something really unique and original. That song [Edge] played me recently…”
The Edge: “Lambrini Girls. I’m just so jealous of them. Now that’s a sound I would love to hear on a U2 album. Just the sonics are fantastic.”
Bono: “That’s it. You have to up your game when people step into the room like Fontaines D.C….”
The Edge: “Or Geese. I love what they’re doing, and Cameron Winter’s solo stuff as well. Did you see him on Jimmy Kimmel when he played ‘Drinking Age’? Wow.”
Bono: “He’s the man who understands the power of a silhouette. An original silhouette only comes along every 10 or 20 years. I went to see Geese and he was standing with his back to us. He knows about shadows. The band were going at it like Cookie Monster from Sesame Street, the drummer was incredible, but he was pulling some shapes. As a shape-puller, I appreciated that.
“But Grian [Chatten] has got a very unique spirit. Everyone thinks of singers and songwriters as going around with a diviner, but I think the reason you’re drawn to certain music is like that and you then explain it to yourself later. They just work very well together that band, they’ve got something extraordinary. That was a great song they did with Rosalía [‘Where Is Gone?‘].
And what was it about Rosalía that you wanted to capture on ‘The Mirror Maker?
Bono: “She’s doing something completely unique and different, and making the world fit around her aesthetic. The reason we wrote ‘The Mirror Maker’ about her is because all of us artists occasionally have to look in the mirror. There’s a bit of narcissism involved, there’s the world behind you, so that’s OK, we can suffer that. She’s more interested in what’s behind the mirror than her own reflection.
“This is preposterous to think that I know or we know what’s going on in the artist’s mind. She’s amazing. Normally for us to write a song about people, they have to either be in jail or dead. I’m very grateful she’s neither!”
The Edge: “I also love the fact she has this healthy disrespect for staying in her lane. She will draw on so many different influences from flamenco to opera, fine arts, modern dance, whatever. I love that. That’s kind of what we’ve done over the years.”
Bono: “Smashing the mirror, if you have to make it short. She goes through the mirror.”
And you’ve also got Wolf Alice supporting you on your UK stadium tour next year?
Bono: “Yeah, they’re another extraordinary band that won’t stay in their lane. They are swerving all over the road. That’s why we’re bands.”
You’ve just celebrated your 50th anniversary, which is no mean feat. You’ve said before that it feels like you split up and then reform after each record..
Bono: “Only the good ones!”
How do you feel about the future right now?
The Edge: “I know Bono feels the same, but I still feel like I could wake up tomorrow and be part of the best U2 song we’ve ever come up with. There’s still a lot of creative ambition within the group, and so that’s a reason to get out of bed. I don’t see that stopping anytime soon either.”
Bono: “I don’t think you should expect to always have this feeling around you. People can walk under a bus, people can push you under a bus! Things can change. Like we said earlier, you sublimate your ego to be around your bandmates – people can get fed up with that as they grow older.
“As Marianne Faithfull said, ‘Never underestimate the male ego, darling’. People grow out of that. I have a little bit of experience of being on my own, and I didn’t like it. I need the band way more than they need me. To be with Edge and realise there’s nobody who plays guitar like him and we’ve a shot at it. We’ve a shot at that thing that’s always around the corner.”
What’s your advice for new bands looking to last 50 years?
Bono: “No aftershave. Careful with that…”
The Edge: “It’s about pooling the idea of where you want to go once you’ve all signed up to the same idea of what you want to do and where you want to go. There’s a great quote from Nietzche which is, ‘He who has figured out the why in their life can bare any how’. It gives you so much resilience if you’re united in that sense of where you want to go and what you want to do.
“Just don’t give up once you’ve set your sights, just keep going. That’s what you’re seeing with Fontaines. They’re gaining so much because they’re so authentic and just doing their thing. It’s wonderful to see.”
Bono: “‘Listen to Edge’ would be my advice. Music is the condition all art aspires towards. I remember when the NME did feel like an enemy, but I also remember when it felt like a real friend. I remember buying the NME at 16 and 17, and these writers were not fucking around, they were looking for the other stuff. ‘What’s the other stuff? Let’s find that!’ I used to read it every week thinking, ‘Oh, there’s other people who care about music as much as I do’. We all serve the same ends. We work for music. We get other ways, some too much for our own good, but some musicians don’t get paid at all. That’s something to try and change. It’s a very unfair business model at play presently.
“If I were to put anything on the bonfire, I would put the way music is treated at the moment financially for people who can’t play live like we can. We can make a living. But the commodification of music, let’s throw that on the bonfire this very night!”
U2 release ‘Carnaval De Luz’ on Friday November 13, ahead of a lengthy world tour in 2027. Visit here for tickets and more information.