U2 guitarist The Edge has revealed that the band are working on new music, but perhaps not the kind of music that anyone was anticipating.
Last year, frontman Bono told The New York Times that he wanted to make a “noisy, uncompromising, unreasonable guitar album”, stating “Right now I want to write the most unforgiving, obnoxious, defiant, fuck-off-to-the-pop-charts rock ‘n’ roll song that we’ve ever made.”
“I don’t think the world is waiting on the next U2 album,” Bono later admitted to Mojo magazine’s Danny Eccleston. “I think we have to give them a reason to be interested in it. I just want to write great tunes, because that’s where U2 started – with big choruses, clear ideas. And let’s go back there, but do it with some petrol and some matches.”
However, this does not appear to be where the band’s heads are at at this moment in time, if The Edge’s comments to BBC Radio 2 DJ Jo Whiley yesterday (November 25) are to be believed.
During the conversation, The Edge revealed that he and Bono have been working in Dublin with ambient music pioneer Brian Eno.
“Bono and I are working on some crazy kind of sci-fi Irish folk music,” he says. “Which could end up becoming a part of the new U2 album. We’re not sure yet, we’ll see.”
Teasing that “a bunch [of] beautiful, Irish musicians” could be contributing, the guitarist added, “Part of our kind of process is to go so widely away from, off track, and the sort of the process of bringing things back on track is kind of how you get sort of unique sounding music.”
“We’re at that great phase where we don’t have to over think it, we’re just making music and loving that process. And then we’ll figure out where things belong afterwards.”
U2’s last album of new material, Songs Of Experience, was released in 2017.
