Boy
(39/100 Greatest Irish Albums)

They began as they meant to go on. The Undertones were getting teenage kicks and SLF were snarling about suspect devices, but while U2’s sound was equally jagged and hormonal, their themes were already leaning toward metaphysical, if not existentialist. Boy kicked off with a charging question mark in the form of a pledge called ‘I Will Follow’, before creeping into the Freud ‘n’ Jung forest of adolescent silhouettes with songs like ‘Shadows And Tall Trees’, ‘Twilight’ and ‘Stories For Boys’. And at the centre, the dark fantasia of ‘Into The Heart’/’An Cat Dubh’, in which The Edge established himself as one of rock ‘n’ roll’s great minimalists, alternating between sparse atmospherics and blinding shards of light. Elsewhere were meditations on mortality (‘Out Of Control’), teenage suicide (‘A Day Without Me’), and the child’s feeing of being infinitesimal amidst the infinite (‘The Ocean’). This was no mere juvenilia. U2 were painting their Dorian Gray.