U2 has released "Carnaval De Luz," an album that, in NPR's review, sounds less like a bid to chase new trends than like a band rummaging through its own catalog with "unapologetic delight."
The Edge had earlier talked about a "sci-fi Irish folk project," the review said, but the finished album is not particularly experimental, aside from "an uptick in the guitarist's pedals-happy noise generation." Opening track "Go (Carnaval De Luz)" starts with a wash of noise that points back to "The Fly" from 1992's "Achtung Baby." "Silencio" recalls "Two Hearts Beat as One," from 1983's "War." "The Greatest Show on Earth" is a ballad in the band's Wim Wenders-era register, and "Glorify" scales down the strut of 2004's "Vertigo." Bono cycles through beat-poet rapping, falsetto, a broken croon and the familiar wail. Larry Mullen Jr., the review said, "shows what expensive physical therapy can do by banging the drums with machine-gun force."
An engagement with Latin music, signaled by Spanish in the title and by Bono's comment that one track was named after Rosalía, "thankfully proven to be less like weird appropriation than a reinforcement of the Eurotrashy cosmopolitanism" the group introduced on "Achtung Baby," the review said. Rosalía's reported response — an amused "Do I have to sing on this?" — is quoted as fitting "The Mirror Maker (Rosalía)," which NPR called a genuine expression of awe at a younger artist rather than a cringeworthy come-on. Longtime studio allies Brian Eno and Jacknife Lee, the review said, keep the production agile rather than returning to the big-sky sound of the Daniel Lanois era.
Faith is more explicit than it was in the 1990s. "Street of Dreams" begins with the Psalm-like line "God, hear me shout," and on "Glorify" Bono addresses people who reject the spiritual. "Torn," which NPR said was apparently the last song Dolly Parton recorded, "pushes the limits of mawkishness" even as it leans on a shared conviction that loving your neighbor remains possible. "Midnight Sunshine" turns on the line, "You say God no longer cares for us / I say the stars are only there for us to shine."
The review also noted the timing: the album arrived just after U.S. midterms that, in the critic's phrase, "solidified the return of liberal confidence," and the music "runs on a similar energy," with humor and Adam Clayton's bass loosening Bono's heavier pronouncements.
Casual fans who bristle at preaching may not love the more devout songs. Those willing to follow an older, self-referential U2 will find an album that, as NPR put it, is "reflective and repentant," built on the band's own history rather than on someone else's trend.