Review: U2 is a rock n roll band at the end of history

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Set us as preferred Eight songs into U2’s new album, and there it is: the silvery thrum of the Edge’s electric guitar, echoing into infinity as Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr.lock into a driving groove and Bono starts crooning about how “love’s the hardest easy thing.”More than any other passage on “Carnaval de Luz,” which dropped Friday, the beginning of “The Greatest Show on Earth” is instantly identifiable as the work of these four veteran musicians — and clearly an assertion, 50 years after they formed the group, that they’ve still got it.Except, hold on: What’s that Bono sings when he gets to the song’s sweeping chorus?If this is love, don’t act surprised when you get hurtEven if our dreams lay in the dirtWe were once the greatest show on EarthStuck in a moment you can get out of — that’s the spirit of U2’s 16th studio LP, a grippingly honest if typically idealistic meditation on the value of a rock ’n’ roll band at the end of history.The quartet’s first album of new songs in nearly a decade, “Carnaval de Luz” might easily have not happened: After touring the world to celebrate the 30th anniversary of “The Joshua Tree,” Mullen was in such bad shape physically (thanks to a long-standing neck injury) that he sat out U2’s residency at the Las Vegas Sphere in 2023 and 2024.

And even if the drummer was able to play — a necessary precondition, his bandmates have said, for the group to make a record — it’s not as though anyone was clamoring for one after the increasingly tedious “Songs of Innocence”/“Songs of Experience”/“Songs of Surrender” project.Music The Grammy-winning songwriter has a new PBS special and an album of old tunes he describes as his ‘problem children.’But then Mullen met a young neurosurgeon willing to perform a risky surgery; back toge...