U2 have dropped a surprise EP titled Days of Ash, their first new music since 2017's Songs of Experience.
Released today (February 18) to commemorate Ash Wednesday, the six-track EP includes five new original songs by the Irish band and one song featuring a poem by Yehuda Amichai. Track six, "Yours Eternally" features an appearance by Ed Sheeran and Taras Topolia, a Ukranian singer U2 previous performed with at a Kyiv bomb shelter back in 2022.
“The songs on Days of Ash are very different in mood and theme to the ones we’re going to put on our album later in the year,” Bono explained in a press release. “These EP tracks couldn’t wait; these songs were impatient to be out in the world. They are songs of defiance and dismay, of lamentation. Songs of celebration will follow, we’re working on those now… because for all the awfulness we see normalized daily on our small screens, there’s nothing normal about these mad and maddening times and we need to stand up to them before we can go back to having faith in the future. And each other.”
U2 - including drummer Larry Mullen Jr., who briefly took a leave to recover from surgery - met to record the EP as a tribute to those who have lost their lives in political unrest, including Minnesotan mother Renée Good (“American Obituary"), Iranian teenager Sarina Esmailzadeh (“Song of the Future”), and Palestinian Awdah Hathaleen (“One Life at a Time”), who served as a consultant on the Oscar-winnining documentary No Other Land.
Ukrainian filmmaker Ilya Mikhaylus has also directed a short documentary for the song “Yours Eternally,” which will see a release on February 24, to mark the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Along with the EP, the band also re-launched their Propaganda zine, which they founded 40 years ago. The one-off digital zine, which will also be available in print in select stores, is titled U2 - Days of Ash: Six Postcards From The Present… Wish We Weren’t Here, and features a Q&A with Bono, notes from each band member, song lyrics, and exclusive interviews with Mikhaylus, Topolia, and film producer Pyotr Verzilov.
Rolling Stone points out that Bono discusses an upcoming U2 album in the Propaganda interview.
“There’s a lot more than 25 songs in the works,” Bono said. “But I’d say about 25 are worth considering for U2 projects in the next few years. The album contenders are very different in mood and theme than the ones we’ve chosen to put out on the Days of Ash EP. More songs of celebration than lamentation…more of a defiantly joyful kind of feel to take on these anxious times…almost a carnival vibe.”
“You can only kick at the darkness for so long,” he adds. “We’re going to try and make the light brighter real soon… We’re going try finding it in each other and our fans. We’re gonna try to find that carnival atmosphere in our audience, where hopefully we can both show each other not just where we are at but where we want to be at…Serious fun is required. We can’t always be letting the bad news drown out the good news.”
Back in November 2024, guitarist The Edge teased that the band had been working on their next album with producer Brian Eno and that it could sound like "some crazy kind of sci-fi Irish folk music."