U2's Carnaval de Luz: Bono gets his mojo back

Updated / Friday, 6 Nov 2026 07:45

It's an album of two halves from U2 but one which offers a sense of sanctuary and shining optimism. All this and Dolly Parton...

U2 are seeking the "re-enchantment of the world" on their fifteenth album and their first in nearly a decade. It’s full of eulogies dressed up as rock 'n’ slogans, guitar belters, and tender ballads - all of course suffused with religiosity and spiritualism but mostly Carnaval de Luz aims to be the light and the way, a clarion call of hope in a weary world gone mad.

Or as Bono has it, "We made the melodies sweeter and the songs, they better shine, because if the world is in darkness, we better not be." Unlike the politically-fueled protest songs on the Days of Ash and Easter Lily EPs earlier this year, this is the sound of celebration. It’s also the album on which Bono gets his mojo back.

Produced once again by Jacknife Lee (along with EDM star Martin Garrix, Brian Eno and Ryan Tedder) and with Larry Mullen back behind his kit again, it’s the freshest and most immediate the band have sounded in an age. After a frankly extraordinary fifty years together, Carnaval de Luz is U2 reinvigorated, if not reinvented. They are also having a lot of fun.

We are at least in terra incognito on opening track Go (Carnival De Luz). It’s a curtain raiser - with Brian Eno pulling the strings - that starts like a long lost edit from Delia Derbyshire’s Radiophonic Workshop, with Doctor Who theme electronica giving way to Achtung Baby era guitars and a throwaway quality that sounds refreshing after the dourness of U2’s last few studio albums. La Reina, the band’s exaltation of their very own queen of the carnival, retools the guitars from Even Better Than The Real Thing and embraces a sense of unbridled drama, mess and mischief. The Mirror Maker (Rosalía) is a skyscraping paean to Catalan singer Rosalía, who recently made a ravishing appearance on Fontaines D.C.'s new album and it scales the heights of rapture with a hammering force that can’t contain itself.

Naturally, there are clunkers and potholes along the way for this soon to be globetrotting carnival. Superficiality is a bit of a howler. Lyrical wayward ("you and me are breaking news because the news can’t break us"), it’s a toppling wedding cake of a song but it does redeem itself by boasting some of the same urgency and spark of the band’s War era, while The Greatest Show On Earth, a song about self-reflection and self-doubt, gets lost in middle-eight bloat.

But this is an album of two halves, with the second side leaving the first for dust and from the strutting attack of Silencio onwards, the band achieve a real sense of take-off and weightlessness. The earthy and organic Glorify is among the best (and most bittersweet) songs here, and the lovely, sparse Midnight Sunshine is a light-as-a-feather love song with a delightful guitar jangle, twinkling bells, and Bono beaming down his verities with a grin: "If you want stop the devil getting bigger, stop repeating his name".

The unashamedly optimistic Can’t Stop Us Now shrouds its hope in darker shades. An atmospheric epic, it really stretches its legs and features Adam Cayton’s best bass part in years and the Edge in excelsis amid banks of shimmering synths and clattering drums.

But in the grand tradition of the showman since time immemorial, why not save the best until last? Back in 1993, Johnny Cash sang The Wanderer, the superb closing track on U2’s album Zooropa. He sounded like a gloomy preacher trudging through a nuclear winter; for Torn, the last song on Carnaval De Luz, the late Dolly Parton makes her final ever recording on what is a moving and faltering duet on which she sings about "a house divided", and how "brothers turn to strangers and sons deny their name." As ever with U2, the personal is political and the political is personal.

It’s quite a curtain closer to a record that is a shelter from the storm and a place of sanctuary. After maybe too long sorting through their past, it sounds like U2 aren’t willing to sign off on their legacy just yet - they want to keep the show on the road.

Carnaval De Luz is released on the 13th of November

Tracklist

# Track Title

1. Go (Carnaval de Luz)
2. La Reina
3. Street of Dreams
4. The Mirror Maker (Rosalía)
5. Superficiality
6. If the World Is at War We Better Not Be
7. Silencio
8. The Greatest Show on Earth
9. Glorify
10. Midnight Sunshine
11. Can't Stop Us Now
12. Torn (featuring Dolly Parton)