Nine years since their last album of new material, can U2 still deliver? Graham Reid reviews Carnaval de Luz

Review by

Graham Reid

Music writer·New Zealand Listener·

10 Nov, 2026 05:04 PM3 mins to read

Graham Reid is an NZ journalist, author, broadcaster and arts educator. His website, Elsewhere, provides features and reports on music, film, travel and other cultural issues.

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Mysterious waves: U2, still testifying and still working their formulae. Photo / Viviane Sassen

Carnaval de Luz

By U2

Although U2 remain dominant crowd pleasers in the rock landscape, they, like the Rolling Stones, have long ceased to be musically relevant, their position largely anchored by almost half a century of frontline action.

After their often thrilling and innovative albums Achtung Baby (1991)
and Zooropa (1993) – and the magisterial technology of the concerts – the band mostly reverted to type: heroic songs sometimes leaning into the bombastic; lyrics tapping into contemporary unease; the distinctive chime of The Edge’s guitar; Bono’s ballad-to-bellow mannerisms …

There were sometimes exceptional and even challenging songs along the way – 2023’s Songs of Surrender where they retrofitted 40 of their own well-known works was interesting – but, despite the many remixes, remasters and different producers, U2 have been mostly working their formulae.

This year’s Days of Ash and Easter Lily EPs in advance of this new album showed commitment and sharp politics (American Obituary, The Tears of Things), but also some of The Edge and Bono’s most trite and cliched lyrics (Song for Hal).

From ongoing sessions with producer Jacknife Lee (and others), their 16th studio album arrives as a bona fide U2 rock album, with the riff-driven La Reina, the stadium-shaped Silencio (which skewers “the church playing crowd control”) and the faux-funk urgency of Street of Dreams riding one of The Edge’s signature riffs.

Although there are borrowed riffs – check The Mirror Maker (Rosalia) and self-plagiarism on The Greatest Show on Earth – the cannoning drumming of Larry Mullen adds tension, notably to They Can’t Stop Us Now: “I see a summer down the road … where the problems that can’t be solved remain a mystery.”

Although there’s much that is U2’s signature here – the same four people can’t help but sound like themselves – it isn’t without interest, reflecting on their own origins in If The World is at War We Better Not Be: “No such things as rock and roll, we just needed it to be. I was standing in the schoolyard waiting for you to happen to me.”

The running order rolls towards optimism with Midnight Sunshine reinforcing the positive when you’re taking cover in your bedroom or a bunker: “In the imagination of God we are all made up, catastrophising is the glamourising of the world’s pain. You say God no longer cares for us, I say the stars are only there for us.”

It closes with Dolly Parton’s final recording, a heartbreaking country duet with Bono about a woman’s love for two brothers: “How am I supposed to choose? I love ’em both and I just feel so torn.” She is in appropriately fragile, then ascending, voice on what could be a Civil War ballad or on the soundtrack of the recent tele-series East of Eden.

Here U2 dig deep into their bag of religious mysticism with references to God, “St Cecilia pray for us tonight,” angels, the altar, “a light has entered the darkness, no darkness can put it out,” Jesus of Rio …

Perhaps in troubling times we need an optimistic and boisterous carnival of light, and certainties like the familiarity of U2 testifying and an ancient faith invoked.

They think we do.

U2’s Carnaval De Luz is available digitally, on CD and vinyl from Friday, November 13. Photo / SuppliedSaveShare this article

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