Album Review: U2, Carnaval de Luz

Fifty years in, U2  still know how to make a grand entrance. Opener ‘Go (Carnaval De Luz)’ is a mammoth Brian Eno/U2 hybrid – a wonderfully atmospheric invention that fully meets the band’s appetite for scale. And, blindfolded, you could pick the riff on the title track out of a line-up – it’s unmistakably The Edge, still marvellously inventing uses for a sonic stamp that he patented half a century ago.

Eno’s synths gather around it, then Bono enters, part Sinatra, part street preacher, the crooner’s intimacy giving way to the evangelist’s urge to reach the back row. Beneath it all, as ever, Adam and Larry supply the propulsion – that legendary engine room making even the grandest gestures feel physically grounded.

And the title, it turns out, is something of a Trojan horse. ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ arrives carrying the swagger of a band who have long had a formidable claim to the billing, before it opens into something far more intimate and challenging: the spectacle of two people, and the wreckage left when their mutual intrigue is extinguished.

‘Midnight Sunshine’ is fresh as a daisy and strewn with intriguing non-sequiturs, Bono pleading for a song with the impact of a boxing glove – something the world might fear – rather than another love song. On a record so steeped in faith and love, the request is pleasingly cheeky.

Meanwhile, ‘Can’t Stop Us Now’ drones in from the boondocks, gathering menace before plunging into a swampy breakdown that bristles with post-punk bite. The track is a revelation, making its sonic passage into ‘Torn’ all the more affecting – Bono and Dolly Parton’s closing duet is strikingly vulnerable, with Daniel Lanois’s pedal steel tracing the hurt around them beautifully. An album with a taste for grand declarations finds an eloquent ending in the things people so often struggle to say to one another.

Elsewhere, there is more to savour. ‘Silencio’ is a delicious slice of surf rock, its devilish whispers adding a devious portent to the exuberance. ‘The Mirror Maker’ – now there’s a title – takes the bends at speed, and arrives at the chequered flag following a genre rollercoaster, that channels a Bowie-like delight in slipping between identities.

‘If The World Is At War We Better Not Be’ offers an origin myth with a difference, as it strives for a reckoning with the beliefs that brought these four Northsiders together. Then there is ‘Street Of Dreams’ – the first single from Carnaval de Luz that took them to the streets of Mexico for a gorgeous celebratory video –  which oozes U2 DNA and promises to become something of a klaxon call for summer 2027, when its invitation will pass from Bono to the thousands, or rather the millions, singing it back.

Roll up, roll up: there’s be a carnival coming to town! U2 are back – with a vengeance.

9/10

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