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Underrated U2 Songs That Deserve Another Listen
Dig into these 12 hidden gems ahead of the band’s new release, ‘Carnaval De Luz’
7-minute read
“Carnaval de Luz” marks U2’s first full-length collection of new original material since “Songs of Experience” in 2017.
Viviane Sassen
Fifty years ago, U2 got its humble start in the kitchen of 14-year-old drummer Larry Mullen Jr., after three classmates at Dublin’s Mount Temple Comprehensive School responded to his bulletin-board note seeking musicians for a band.Today, the Irish quartet is arguably the biggest rock band on the planet, with 175 million albums sold, a history of record-setting, groundbreaking concert tours and an unflagging quest to grow and innovate that has sustained its relevance for half a century.
The original lineup of Mullen, 65, singer Bono, 66, guitarist The Edge, 65, and bassist Adam Clayton, 66, will release their 16th album, Carnaval De Luz, on Nov. 13. It expands a sprawling songbook filled with classics that resonate across generations and around the world. But percolating beneath the hits lie myriad musical treasures worthy of a closer listen. Check out a dozen of U2’s greatest underrated songs.
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“Out of Control” (Three, 1979)
U2’s debut single, a youthful burst of punk energy, was on a three-song EP released in Ireland on the CBS Ireland label. It later popped up in retooled versions on Boy and Songs of Surrender. While the lyrics suggest teen rebellion, Bono also confronts the lack of control in life’s two biggest moments: birth and death. Producer Chas De Whalley, the first London talent scout to champion U2, recalls a fractious, shambolic recording session. “Larry’s time-keeping was not good at all.… So there was a degree of friction between me and Larry. And I didn’t realize it at the time, but Bono was standing in the background seething at my attitude. But we struggled and we finally got something that just about works.”
“Drowning Man” (War, 1983)
Bono borrowed the title of this moving, haunting song from a play he was writing in the style of Samuel Beckett. The song, which makes no mention of a drowning man, is a beguiling blend of Bono’s pleading vocals, Clayton’s thumping bass, The Edge’s graceful acoustic guitar, Mullen’s understated snare and Steve Wickham’s Middle Eastern-inspired violin.
The Irish rock legends’ 16th studio album, “Carnaval de Luz,” is described by The Edge as “a messy, provocative, sacred collection of songs.”
Courtesy U2
In lyrics that bind love and spirituality, Bono drops in a biblical reference, paraphrasing Isaiah 40:31:
“Like eagles you’ll run, you’ll run /You’ll run and not grow weary.”
Snippets of “Drowning Man” have cropped up in U2 concerts, but the song has never been performed in its entirety. Edge has described this intimate, soulful track as “perfection. It’s one of the most successful pieces of recording we’ve ever done.”
“Exit” (The Joshua Tree, 1987)
A radical deviation from U2’s signature optimism and joy, “Exit” may be the darkest song in the band’s catalog. In the book U2 by U2, Bono explains that, after he read Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, “Exit” was his attempt to get in the mind of a serial killer:
“It is all very well to address America and the violence that is in an aggressive foreign policy, but to really understand that you have to get under the skin of your own darkness, the violence that we all contain within us.”
The song, a long jam that Joshua Tree coproducer Brian Eno trimmed, casts an ominous spell, with stark vocals and a sinister bass building to crashing drums and agitated guitar. At his trial in 1991, stalker Robert Bardo testified that “Exit” had inspired him to murder actress Rebecca Schaeffer in 1989. U2 stopped performing the song for nearly three decades after that.
During a U2 performance on May 30, 1983, in Devore, California, Bono famously climbed more than 100 feet up the stage’s support canvas during the set, accidentally tearing it — and solidifying the band’s reputation as an unforgettable live act.
Paul Natkin/Getty Images
“Luminous Times (Hold On to Love)” (“With or Without You” B-Side, 1987)
The demo version of this passionate song about love’s obsessive power landed on the flip side of smash hit “With or Without You,” an indication of U2’s artistic surge during the Joshua Tree sessions. The song has never been performed live.
“Luminous Times” opens with a stately keyboard, then swells into a churning welter of sound. Bono sings with raw intensity as Edge’s fleet, jangly riffs and Mullen’s thundering tom-tom underscore tense lyrics that hint at the hazards of romantic addiction:
“She is the gunfire / She is the car crash /She is the avalanche /She is the thunder /She is the waves and /She pulls me under.”
“In God’s Country” (The Joshua Tree, 1987)
“We need new dreams tonight,” Bono pleads on this evocative track that explores Joshua Tree’s theme of a dual America through the metaphor of a vast desert full of possibilities, peril and pain. “Eventually I dedicated the song to the Statue of Liberty,” Bono said in a 1987 radio interview, as he decried the country’s adherence to antiquated political ideals. “I wanted to write about America and ... the dream. The American dream. And I wonder, where are the people that will rise to the challenge? You know, where are the new dreamers?” The Edge’s keening acoustic and electric guitars, Clayton’s graceful, sparse bass and the overlapping time signatures create a sense of restlessness and yearning. Bono achingly delivers a chorus of chilling imagery:
“Sleep comes like a drug in God’s country /Sad eyes, crooked crosses in God’s country.”
“So Cruel” (Achtung Baby, 1991)
Dark and brooding, even lacerating, “So Cruel” is a sharp departure from U2’s legion of gorgeous love songs. Inspired in part by The Edge’s separation from his first wife, Aislinn O’Sullivan, it addresses romantic wreckage.
The vocal is wrenching, the lyrics fearlessly honest and, at times, brutal:
“I’m only hanging on to watch you go down, my love.”
Unlike many of the elaborate technical wonders on Achtung Baby, “So Cruel” is comparatively unembellished. Ponderous drums and bleak keyboards provide slo-mo, otherworldly atmospherics. Dreamy strings that creep in later fail to mask the naked rage and misery.
“Until the End of the World” (Achtung Baby, 1991)
One of Achtung Baby’s most intriguing tracks, this deep-grooved rocker lays a base of spine-chilling guitar and a thick, foreboding groove to showcase a New Testament triptych. In a forlorn, droning vocal, Bono role-plays Judas addressing Jesus Christ. First he reminisces about the Last Supper, then describes his betrayal with a kiss in the Garden of Gethsemane and finally confesses his guilt and despair. Different versions of the song appear in Wim Wenders’ film of the same name and its soundtrack.
(From left) Adam Clayton, The Edge (David Howell Evans), Bono (Paul David Hewson) and Larry Mullen Jr. pose in 1984.
Fryderyk Gabowicz/Getty Images
“Lady with the Spinning Head” (“One” B-side, 1992)
During the Achtung Baby sessions, U2 took several stabs at this composition before deeming it a hopeless cause and salvaging chunks for other songs. Pieces of the dizzying, danceable mashup fed into “The Fly,” “Zoo Station” and “Ultraviolet (Light My Way).” The title refers to a roulette wheel, and the gambling protagonist is no high roller:
“Mean old man took away my car /Those credit guys, they’ve got the power.”
A rhythmic blast blazing with guitar shimmer, “Spinning Head” ranks high among U2 rarities, and its failure to land on Achtung Baby indicates just how brilliant U2’s output was in that era.
“Zooropa” (Zooropa, 1993)
Zooropa’s title track, a futuristic techno-metal masterpiece that fuses U2’s early rock with cyberpunk, opens with a buzzy collage of muffled voices from radio signals. Bass and piano drift in and intensify, followed by The Edge’s eerie and wobbly guitar effects, a shift to louder wah-wah and drums, then Bono’s faint voice asking, “What do you want?” That’s just the intro. Ad slogans, from Audi’s “Vorsprung Durch Technik” (Progress Through Technology) to United Airlines’ “Fly the friendly skies,” populate lyrics that skewer consumer culture and dwell on uncertainty and alienation. Bono sounds lost, singing:
“And I have no compass /And I have no map.”
“Holy Joe (Garage Mix)” (“Discothèque” B-side, 1997)
This is the slightly better of two versions on the “Discothèque” single. “Guilty Mix” has an electronic sheen, while “Garage Mix” is a sultry, propulsive, straight-up rocker. “Holy Joe” erupts with rumbling drums, brash guitar and sexy, exuberant vocals about a seductive rogue:
“Totally messed up in everybody’s life /Closer than ever to everybody’s wife.”
It’s the perfect banger for a live show, yet U2 has performed it only once, in 1997, in the lingerie department of a Kmart in downtown New York: The song opened a press conference announcing the PopMart tour.
“Kite” (All That You Can’t Leave Behind, 2000)
The turn of the century signaled a return to basics and a move away from the experimental flights of U2’s three previous albums. “Kite,” one of the band’s most beloved deep cuts, is a bittersweet, midtempo tune with a beautiful melody and ethereal instrumentation. Bono conveys vulnerability and apprehension in contemplative lyrics that address changing relationships and an uncertain future. It was initially inspired by a kite-flying outing with his daughters, Eve and Jordan, but The Edge concluded that it was about Bono’s dad, who was dying of cancer.
“Bono was convinced he was writing about his kids, but I could see that it was more about his dad,” the guitarist says in the U2 by U2 autobiography. “I think he was struggling to figure out how to deal with it, because his dad was a very dry person who found emotions difficult, and Bono is such an emotional and open character, so there was an incredible mismatch.”
“Window in the Skies” (U218 Singles, 2006-2007)
Bono puts his falsetto to work in the addictive chorus on this glorious, joyous, Beatlesque song buoyed by euphoric lyrics:
“The shackles are undone /The bullets quit the gun /The heat that’s in the sun /Will keep us when there’s none.”
It’s one of two tracks on U218 Singles recorded at London’s Abbey Road Studios with Rick Rubin. Those are the only songs that surfaced from the 2006 collaboration with the producer.
The amazing “Window in the Skies” video, directed by Gary Koepke, edited roughly 100 live clips of music legends, including Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Elvis Presley, so that they appear to be performing the U2 song.
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