U2 singer Bono spoke to Rolling Stone magazine and gave fans an update on their forthcoming new album (still untitled). He confirmed they are working on the follow-up to 2017’s ‘Songs Of Experience’.
Bono spoke to RS while at Cannes Film Festival (he was there promoting his upcoming one-man feature Bono: Stories of Surrender, about to stream on Apple TV+ on May 30).
Bono said, “Nostalgia is not to be tolerated for too long, but sometimes you’ve got to deal with the past in order to get to the future and to the present. To get back to now is our desire. Get back to this moment we’re in.”
Bono added, “and it sounds like future to me,” he said. “We had to go through some stuff, and we’re at the other end of it.”
You may remember that last November, U2 guitarist The Edge confirmed that drummer Larry Mullen Jr. was back in the studio working with the band (he had to sit out of the band’s Vegas Sphere residency after an injury & subsequent surgery).
Bono told RS, “We’ve been playing in the room together, the four of us. And I can tell you (Mullen Jr.) is completely through whatever storm of injury he’s been through. His playing is at its most innovative. He’s just all about the band. He doesn’t want to talk about anything else, which is kind of amazing.”
Bono added, “By the way, being a band in a room where each individual musician has a role that’s singular and collective is so rare because music is assembled these days. And even some of our music we have assembled, and we’ll do that again, but to try and capture a moment of a rock & roll band in full flight is at the heart of this record that we’re making that we’ve recorded, but we are not finished.”
Prior to Bono’s RS comments, last November The Edge told the magazine the album wouldn’t be ‘a straight up rock thing’. In January, he said new U2 music will come “very soon”.
It’s official. A new U2 album is being worked on. What should they call it?
