U2 Didn’t Know They Were Making a U2 Album

The Edge wasn’t expecting to make a U2 album when they started working on the project that became Carnaval de Luz.

The band needed a break, he explained, and the members were pursuing their own interests without consideration of what would become their 16th LP.

In fact, when the Edge and Bono started collaboration once again with Brian Eno, they imagined it might result in another offshoot release in the style of 1995’s Original Soundtracks 1, issued under the name Passengers.

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They’d also been waiting for drummer Larry Mullen’s return from a health-based hiatus. “That was in some ways the main trigger,” the Edge tells Uncut. “We’d been developing a lot of material that could have gone towards an album, so we had a lot of stuff to choose from.”

In fact, “a lot of the songs were just sketches, and I’d been working on those since the lockdown. And Bono had been working on some stuff. … So we had a stockpile of pretty good material.”

U2’s ‘Carnaval de Luz’ arrives today with a Dolly Parton duet. (Terry Wyatt / Andreas Rentz, Getty Images / True Public Relations)

He says U2 “went in the studio with Brian just to explore where that might take us – we thought it might be another Passengers project. At that point, it was just Bono and myself. But some of those experiments really were so thrilling that we brought them to the band, and developed them into U2 songs.”

Everyone was “playing well, and the ideas were inspiring everybody, so we didn’t think too much,” the Edge added. “We just followed where the inspiration took us, really. … It was more like just what we were feeling, what felt good and what sounded good to us.”

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Asked if he worried that U2 had already made their final album in 2023’s Songs of Surrender, the Edge said: “I wouldn’t go that far. I think we felt that we needed a bit of a break. First of all to let Larry recover, and also for us to sort of take stock of where we were. But I think we were pretty confident we’d make another U2 record at some point. We just weren’t sure what it would be and when it would be.”

The result of those occasionally uncertain times is Carnaval de Luz. The new LP arrives today, with the final recorded vocal by the late Dolly Parton as a highlight.

“We generally have a lot of fun making albums,” the Edge said. “I mean, there are tough times. Obviously, we’re being tough on the work, exacting, and you want to try to make it as good as it can be, and that can be at times frustrating.”

Frankly, he added, “there’s a lot of failure involved – which you just have to get used to: Ideas that don’t go where you expect them to, or things that just kind of go down in flames. That’s fine. That’s part of the process.”