February 18, 2026 was a big day for dormant creators. Some wrote fiction after a months-long hiatus, a welcome affirmation that they can still write verbose short stories, not just verbose articles for their school newspaper. Others released a collection of new music for the first time in nine years.
Without any prior announcement, U2 dropped Days of Ash—an EP containing one poem and five protest songs against authoritarianism and religious fundamentalism. They also published a one-off edition of their retired fan club magazine, Propaganda, to serve as the EP’s liner notes. In the magazine, the band revealed more news: a long-promised new album is coming later this year.
“The album contenders are very different in mood and theme to the ones we’ve chosen to put out on the Days of Ash EP… more songs of celebration than lamentation,” U2’s lead singer Bono wrote. “The songs being presented here are all reactions to knee-jerk anxieties… some knee-jerk… some more considered… all likely to offend or annoy some parties, but that’s kind of our job.”
Days of Ash is not a far departure from 2017’s Songs of Experience; it is, overall, more slick pop-rock produced by Jacknife Lee. After a nine-year gap—and especially after The Edge, U2’s guitarist, suggested their next project would be more experimental—it’s an underwhelming sonic direction, but ultimately unsurprising. In the past 26 years, U2 has rarely strayed from this genre. That’s not to say there aren’t pockets of brilliance within those years, and there are certainly things to appreciate on Days of Ash.
The EP opens with “American Obituary,” a rock anthem in the vein of “Elevation” and “Vertigo.” What stands out about this track is its energy. Immediately after pressing play, you’re hit with The Edge tearing into power chords, Adam Clayton’s bass right at the front of the mix, and Larry Mullen Jr. back from sabbatical, doing what he does best: beating the toms like a military drummer.
The lyrics, however, are where things get sticky. On one hand, it’s refreshing to hear Bono sing about something meaningful. “American Obituary” is explicitly about the murder of Renée Good, an American citizen killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026. His decision to dedicate each song on Ash to a specific person, such as Good, is an effective way to cut through the desensitizing barrage of the news cycle. Whether in the US, Venezuela, Iran, Palestine, or Israel, ordinary people are suffering because of brutal and misguided decisions made by governments domestic and foreign. Yet the media focuses on the politicians and the optics of conflict, while the victims become statistics. To say their names and tell their stories is a reminder of what’s really at stake, while stressing the fact that a people and their government are not the same.
Bono’s skill as a lyricist has always been to translate the very personal and the very specific into the universal. But, as he dove further into his activism work in the early 2000s, he learned diplomacy. Consequently, his lyricism became irreversibly intimate with cliches. Aside from two notable exceptions, the lyrics on Ash are too bland to shake the listener. I’ve also seen the criticism that they lack subtlety, which is true, but the standards are a bit different for the “knee-jerk” protest music Bono is looking to emulate. Consider Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s “Ohio,” an iconic protest song about the 1970 Kent State shootings. Lyrically, it’s simple and direct, but the line “What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?” makes you sit up straighter. It demands empathy and reflection. No such line exists within “American Obituary,” “Song Of The Future,” or “Yours Eternally.” That severely limits their power as protest songs.
“Song Of The Future” was written for Sarina Esmailzadeh, a 16-year-old student who was beaten by Iranian security forces at a Women, Life, Freedom protest. Esmailzadeh ultimately died from her injuries. The track is supposed to be “an uplifting enough pop song to honor the exuberance” of the movement, Bono wrote in Propaganda. Between the bouncy propulsion from the Clayton-Mullen rhythm section and an undeniably catchy chorus, “Song Of The Future” sonically achieves that goal, turning Esmailzadeh into a beacon of potential for a more equal future. “Gotta know, gotta find a way to get to her,” Bono sings.
“Yours Eternally,” meanwhile, is the weakest song out of the bunch. It features Ed Sheeran and Taras Topolia, a Ukrainian musician currently serving in the Territorial Defense Forces. Framed as a letter from a soldier on the frontlines in Ukraine, the lyrics are a plea to remain optimistic in the face of horror. However, they are dreadfully generic, as is the composition. Am I naive for hoping U2 experiments with their sound again? Most likely. But I never expected their sound to devolve into stomp and holler ballads. I wish the courage of Topolia and his fellow countrymen was honored with a better salute.
On the other end of the spectrum, “One Life At A Time” and “The Tears Of Things” are the two highlights from the EP. The former is dedicated to the Palestinian activist Awdah Hathaleen. Hathaleen served as a consultant on No Other Land, a 2024 documentary about Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. A year after the International Court of Justice ruled that the settlements, along with “the regime associated with them, have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law,” Hathaleen was shot and killed by an Israeli settler.
The title of the song comes from Basel Adra, one of the filmmakers behind No Other Land. Speaking about Hathaleen’s murder, Adra, a Palestinian, said, “This is how Israel erases us—one life at a time.”
The song begins with Edge and Bono singing those five words in an intermittent pattern, their muffled voices occasionally overlapping as they rise, fall, and ultimately fade away. “You say you wanna save the world / And perfect love drives out all fear / Well, how’s that gonna happen here?” Bono asks, a question that becomes more pressing the second time around, when the song speeds up, his voice becomes more desperate, and Mullen’s drums emerge from the shadows and take over as the driving instrument. The song ends the same way it started, the harmonies a haunting warning. Without the hooks of its companions, “One Life At A Time” is more of a grower, but it’s a beautiful track, featuring some lush, Unforgettable Fire-esque guitar work from The Edge.
Lastly there’s “The Tears Of Things,” arguably the best track on the EP, and certainly the best lyric. After noticing that the Statue of David’s pupils are shaped like hearts, Bono penned a conversation between the sculpture and its creator Michelangelo. “It got me wondering,” Bono wrote in Propaganda, “if Michelangelo thought David needed to have heart-shaped eyes because at some point he was going to cry.”
“The Tears Of Things” is a testament to the Jewish people’s resilience throughout history, as well as an anthem of nonviolence. “The rape, murder, and abduction of Israelis on October 7 was evil… But self-defense is no defense for the sweeping brutality of Netanyahu’s response, measured by the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians,” Bono wrote. The thesis of “The Tears Of Things” is that David defeated Goliath without becoming Goliath himself. Not with a sword, but his faith and his love. “No voice and drum can overcome / A symphony of strings,” as Bono puts it.
Compositionally, “The Tears Of Things” is a bit messy, but that’s fitting for a song about the worst and best of humanity. Like so many great U2 songs, it’s a builder, led by Bono’s raw, powerful vocals. But the best bit is the quietest part, hidden between the most intense part of Bono’s performance and The Edge’s cathartic guitar solo. “If you put a man into a cage and rattle it enough / A man becomes the kind of rage that cannot be locked up,” Edge sings, his voice eerily distorted. “Dear God you made us so you wouldn’t be alone / Every heart is exiled until a heart gets home / Don’t send us back to stone / Don’t send us back to stone.”
A pocket of brilliance.
