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I have mixed views on U2: some days I love them and some days I hate them. To be fair, most of the hate is brought on by lead singer Bono and his do-gooding ways. I’ll just never understand how someone worth millions can preach to all of us who struggle to pay our bills every month about giving our hard-earned money to others. But I digress.
Sticking to the music, I have a love for most of U2′s tracks, with some standing up as the best songs ever released. But I personally feel as though they’ve gone off the boil a little of late, and I usually end up listening to the older material.
So the platitudes emerging from the U2 camp as they write and record their as-yet-untitled 12th studio album fills me with some hope. Not only are the band promising their best album ever, Bono also claims that the new sound hark back to The Joshua Tree, the 1987-release seminal album which launched them on the road to being the huge worldwide success they now are.
Bono was speaking to official website, U2.com when he revealed details on how the new album is taking shape.
“We want 2009 to be our year. We’ve hit a rich songwriting vein and we don’t want to stop.”
“It gets a bit dark down here but looks like we’ve found diamonds not coal. I thought a while back we might have the album wrapped by now, but why come up above ground now if there’s more priceless stuff to be found?”
“We know we have to emerge soon but we also know that people don’t want another U2 album unless it is our best ever album. It has to be our most innovative, our most challenging … or what’s the point ?”
“The last two records were very personal, with a kind of three piece at their heart, the primary colours of rock – bass, guitars and drum. But what we’re about now is of the same order as the transition that took us from The Joshua Tree to Achtung Baby.”
“We want 2009 to be our year, so we’re going to start making an impression very early on …”
The band have been working on this new album, the long-awaited follow-up to 2004′s How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, since last year, and are currently recording in the south of France (see how tough a life Bono has).
Bono’s statement seems to indicate that U2 fans can expect the album to be released early in 2009, and for it to contain a hark back to the sound the band had in the late 1980s.
Hopefully the new album can impress me enough that I don’t consider U2 to have lost it about 10 years ago. It may also make me forget what a condescending arse Bono is at times. If it manages to do that, then this would indeed have to be their best album ever.
[Photo Source: Phil Romans at Flickr]
