At least in recent years, U2 come off as too much of a complicated business mechanism to allow for such spontaneity.) They write and record a lot of songs that do not make it onto their albums, and these days, it’s not like those songs are going to stick around for the five years it’ll take for the next record. (In hindsight, it’s miraculous that they ever released Zooropa, which was originally planned as an EP. From any interview you come across with Bono, the Edge, Larry Mullen, Jr., or Adam Clayton, it’s clear that this is a band that labors over their albums on a level that most artists simply can’t afford to do anymore. U2 albums feel like they have to mean something more, because we know U2 are capable of that and because it’s what we’ve been trained to expect from them. A U2 album couldn’t, or shouldn’t, simply be a collection of 10 or 12 songs that hang together all right. Operating that way can make you a ruthless editor of your own work. They released albums that captured the masses, but were still their own idiosyncratic vision of what was occurring in the world around them. For a long time, U2 were capable of that. The drive to make an album that has a real, tangible idea behind it, that feels like some important installment in a conversation with the culture at large, and being able to pull that off, is one factor that can separate the Great Artists from the very good ones. Creatively speaking, aspiring to an album-as-event is, mostly, something admirable. Whether it’s simply getting older as a band or the fact that they’re stuck inside this machine they’ve built, making music as an event is something that, inevitably, eventually leads to diminishing returns. I mean this as a fan, and in the least cynical way possible, but you can see their efforts to remain ubiquitous. While that album received unfair amounts of hate, it was a telling example of how the band functions today: They know what they are, and they are trying to stay that way. For much of their career, they’ve made their albums events, ranging from the performative statements in the ’90s - when they were still very artistically vital - to the fact that they now take forever to release new music and usually feel the need to provide some kind of stunt or hook, resulting in things like last year’s controversial Songs Of Innocence release.

And, on some level, they might know that. Over the years, “sheer popularity” might be translated into “sheer ubiquity.” They still don’t have a real contender for the mantel of the biggest band in the world, and it’s hard to imagine a time when an artist like them - a band that plays rock music, the classic archetype - would ascend to such a level again.

There’s their sheer popularity, the result of which is that a U2 album can’t really be minor even if the band tried to make it so: It would still be big news, and would still be written about everywhere. In the context of their career, that means various things at various times. U2 are the kind of band that doesn’t so much release albums as release events.

Best u2 songs