U2 have released their first collection of new music since 2017 – a politically charged EP entitled Days of Ash, which focuses on a series of high-profile global deaths including the killing of Renee Good by ICE agents.
Good, a mother of three children who was killed on 7 January while protesting against ICE activity in Minneapolis, is the subject of the opening song, American Obituary.
“Renee Good, born to die free / American mother of three / seventh day January / a bullet for each child, as you can see,” Bono sings on the hard rock song, after a forthright, pealing riff from the Edge. “Renee, the ‘domestic terrorist’? / What you can’t kill can’t die / America will rise against the people of the lie.”
In an extensive interview in a fanzine accompanying the six-song release, a continuation of the Propaganda zines the band began sending fans in the 1980s, Bono characterised Good as “a woman committed to nonviolent civil disobedience”.
He said he was deeply troubled by her being dubbed a domestic terrorist by Kristi Noem, head of the US Department of Homeland Security. “This was an attempt to assassinate meaning itself, the meaning of words, the meaning of truth,” Bono said. “If you let people [get] away with that, you can kiss your democracy goodbye.” He called for an independent inquiry into Good’s death.
On Song of the Future, the band focus on the Women, Life, Freedom protest movement in Iran, which campaigned for the rights of women. They name Sarina Esmailzadeh – who died in September 2022 aged 16 after being beaten by Iranian security forces during the protests, according to an Amnesty International investigation. Iranian officials claimed she killed herself.
Bono sings: “Sarina, Sarina, she’s the song of the future playing in my mind.” In his interview, he characterises Iran’s ruling class as “a priestly class of men whose subjective interpretation of sacred text becomes a club to beat the heads in of anyone who disagrees”.
The song One Life at a Time is about Awdah Hathaleen, a Palestinian activist who was killed in the West Bank in July 2025 by an Israeli settler. Hathaleen had worked on the Oscar-winning film No Other Land. Bono called the killing “heinous” and said he hoped the song would be “a balm”.
The Tears of Things takes its name from the book by Richard Rohr, which applies wisdom from Jewish prophets to address violence and anger today. The lyrics imagine a conversation between Michelangelo’s David and its sculptor. The EP also features the recitation of a poem by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, entitled Wildpeace, read by Nigerian musician Adeola with music from U2.
Bono said: “It’s the moral force of Judaism that helped shape western civilisation,” and celebrated Jewish “mathematicians, scientists, writers, not to mention songwriters”. He added: “As with Islamophobia, antisemitism must be countered every time we witness it. The rape, murder and abduction of Israelis on 7 October was evil, but self-defence is no defence for the sweeping brutality of Netanyahu’s response.”
He also acknowledged the lives lost and displaced during conflict in Sudan, and criticised the Trump administration for cutting US foreign aid.
Ed Sheeran guests on the closing track, Yours Eternally, alongside Ukrainian musician turned soldier Taras Topolia, who inspired the song, which is sung as a letter from a soldier on duty in the conflict with Russia. Sheeran had initially brokered a meeting between Topolia, Bono and the Edge, which then happened when the three played a set in a Kyiv metro station converted into a bomb shelter, in May 2022.
Bono and The Edge performing with Taras Topolia in a metro station bomb shelter in Kyiv, 8 May 2022. Photograph: Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images
“Ask anyone in east Germany or Poland or Latvia if they think Putin will stop at Ukraine if he can get away with it?” Bono said. “He’d find an excuse to invade Ireland if it suited his purposes.” He hailed Sheeran as a “whirling dervish of a talent” and Topolia as having “this dark sense of humour and defiant spirit that we love about the best rock’n’roll music”.
A short documentary accompanying Yours Eternally, directed by Ukrainian film-maker Ilya Mikhaylus ,who was embedded with frontline Ukrainian soldiers, will be released on 24 February to mark the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion.
U2 have released a few one-off new songs in recent years, such as Atomic City and Your Song Saved My Life. In 2023, they released the album Songs of Surrender, featuring reworkings of earlier songs, and in 2024 they released unheard material from the sessions for 2004 album How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. But they haven’t put out an album or EP of new material since the 2017 album Songs of Experience.
In the accompanying fanzine, The Edge wrote: “We believe in a world where borders are not erased by force. Where culture, language and memory are not silenced by fear. Where the dignity of a people is not negotiable. This belief isn’t temporary. It isn’t political fashion. It’s the ground we stand on. And we stand there together.”
Larry Mullen Jr added in an interview: “Going way back to our earliest days, working with Amnesty or Greenpeace, we’ve never shied away from taking a position and sometimes that can get a bit messy, there’s always some sort of blowback, but it’s a big side of who we are and why we still exist.”
Drummer Mullen Jr was absent from U2’s concert residency at the Las Vegas Sphere, as he recovered from neck surgery. He added: “Being honest, I wasn’t sure if I’d get back to playing at all so it was a big deal to be back.” He said he had adapted his posture at the kit to enable him to play, as well as changing his “approach and intention” to the music.
Elsewhere in the zine, bassist Adam Clayton shared his cultural picks (including the band Geese and writer Deborah Levy) and heralded the importance of “tolerance, freedom and choosing not to jump to judgment”.
Bono also outlined his vision for a “radical centre” in politics.
Cover art for U2 – Days Of Ash. Photograph: PR
“The death of truth is the birth of evil,” he said. “I have confidence the righteous will rise up against this aberration. I have many dear conservative friends who are as worried about the far right as my democratic ones are worried about the far left. Surely the world needs a ‘radical centre’ that draws from both traditions.”
U2 also confirmed a long-rumoured new album, saying it would arrive later in the year and be totally separate to the EP material.
“The songs on Days of Ash are very different in mood and theme to the ones we’re going to put on our album later in the year,” Bono said. “These EP tracks couldn’t wait; these songs were impatient to be out in the world. They are songs of defiance and dismay, of lamentation … because for all the awfulness we see normalised daily on our small screens, there’s nothing normal about these mad and maddening times and we need to stand up to them before we can go back to having faith in the future. And each other.”
He added: “Songs of celebration will follow, we’re working on those now,” saying that the new album would have “a carnival vibe … a more defiantly joyful feel”.
Despite the political content of the EP, and U2’s songwriting and activism more generally over the years, he acknowledged that “we have to be sparing with our amplification [of political messaging] … I suggest rationing the bad news as there’s only so much a soul can take”.