Bruce Springsteen’s guitar came alive the night Alex Pretti was killed.
It was a Saturday in January, when officials from the US Department of Homeland Security were executing what the Donald Trump administration called “the largest immigration enforcement operation ever conducted”. Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive-care nurse in Minneapolis, was among the thousands who took to the streets in protest. During a demonstration, two officers deemed Pretti threatening enough to pepper-spray him. Then, they shot him dead.
That night, Springsteen sat down and wrote ‘Streets of Minneapolis’—a furiously passionate song condemning what he called state terror. He dedicated it to innocent immigrants, to the people of the city, and to the memory of Pretti and Renée Good, a 37-year-old writer killed in a similar operation weeks earlier. ‘Streets of Minneapolis’ was released on YouTube, streaming platforms and social media simultaneously. It went viral within hours.
The intensely polarising lyrics had liberals embracing the song and conservatives attacking it. Trump’s former campaign strategist Steve Bannon, who knew the power of a protest song better than most, conceded that the piece was “kind of catchy”, saying, “Bruce is such a blue-collar guy. He is throwing in for the revolution—going on offence, folks!”
Apparently, among those who took the cue, across the Atlantic, were the members of U2.
On Ash Wednesday, February 18—as Trump issued a formal presidential message wishing Americans “a meaningful Lenten season” and Catholic bishops in the US responded by celebrating mass in federal detention centres—the Irish rock band released Days of Ash, a surprise collection of original songs. It addressed not just the killings in Minneapolis, but also Palestinian suffering, the war in Ukraine, and the upheaval in Iran.
Like in the case of Springsteen, nobody saw this musical resistance coming.
U2’s last original material, Songs of Experience, had arrived in 2017, and a full album was expected later this year. But no one had anticipated this EP—an extended play, or half-album—in the interim. “These EP tracks couldn’t wait,” said Bono, U2’s frontman and chief songwriter. “These songs were impatient to be released. They are songs of defiance and dismay, of lament.”
The past decade had not been kind to U2. The group had been drifting toward irrelevance since 2014, when it partnered with Apple to release a fiasco of an album called Songs of Innocence. Apple had made the unusual decision to automatically add the record to the libraries of all iTunes users. This was meant to be a generous gift, but most people saw it as an intrusion that violated their digital privacy. The backlash, swift and vicious, forced Apple to offer users a removal tool. By that time, fewer than one in ten users had ever pressed play.
U2 survived the fallout. They have since kept themselves busy. Over the past decade, they released reimagined versions of their classics, completed a triumphant world tour celebrating the 30th anniversary of The Joshua Tree—the album that had made them internationally famous—and held landmark concerts in venues outside Europe and the US, including one in Mumbai in 2019. Bono even wrote a memoir and filmed an Apple TV+ biopic, even as he kept his activist profile alive.
But for all their restless dynamism, U2 badly needed a comeback.
Days of Ash, happily, does half the job—even before the new album is out.
The EP lands on the 50th anniversary of the band’s formation—one of rock’s longest unchanged line-ups—and a full decade since U2 first sounded the alarm about Donald Trump. In the run-up to the 2016 election, Bono had warned that his presidency could hollow out America, eroding the values of equality, justice, and opportunity—turning the country, as he put it, “into a casino”.
“America is like the best idea the world ever came up with,” Bono had said. “But Donald Trump is potentially the worst idea that ever happened to America.”
Days of Ash is a six-track collection—five new songs and one poem set to music—offering a direct commentary on the tragedies of the Trump era. The standouts are ‘American Obituary’, a protest anthem and opening track that serves as a both lament and hopeful farewell for Renée Good; ‘The Tears of Things’, a longer, Dylan-esque piece capturing sorrow and resistance against authoritarianism; and ‘Song of the Future’, the EP’s most optimistic entry.
The most politically charged tracks are ‘Wildpeace’, a short interlude in which Nigerian artiste Adeola (of the African ensemble Les Amazons d’Afrique) reads a poem by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai; and ‘One Life at a Time’, an introspectively humanist piece referencing figures such Sarina Esmailzadeh, the Iranian teenager who died after being beaten by security forces, and Awdah Hathaleen, the Palestinian activist killed by an Israeli settler in the West Bank.
There are moments in the EP that are cloyingly sentimental—a recurring weakness in U2’s recent work—but the raw earnestness just about holds it all together. The EP also has strong echoes of War, the 1983 album recorded during the Falkland War and the Troubles in Ireland, with hits such as ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ and ‘New Year’s Day’ that are still regarded as U2’s most politically charged work.
Some lines offer striking resonance.“America will rise, against the people of the lie,” goes ‘American Obituary’. Bono has said, in the band’s long-running zine Propaganda, that the song’s title was almost ‘People of the Lie’—taken from a book by American psychiatrist M. Scott Peck. “The book makes the case that at the very heart of evil, there is the ability to easily lie, and worse, believe our own lies,” Bono says. “At a quantum level, the death of truth is the birth of evil.”
Peck argued that human evil—distinct from its religious conceptions—is manifested in people who attack others instead of facing their own failures. His framework feels like a running commentary on the Trump era. So, too, does Bono’s casino metaphor for the Trump presidency: betting markets have now expanded to encompass wars and global conflicts. Users of Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based prediction platform in which the Trump family has invested, recently bet more than $4 million on whether the US and Israel would strike Iran on February 28.
There is a genuine urgency running through Days of Ash that has been missing from U2’s work for years. And, somewhat surprisingly, a near-total absence of overthinking that plagued Bono’s songwriting in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The best of U2 has always emerged from an eager spontaneity bordering on carelessness. A good example: ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’, their tribute to Martin Luther King Jr from the 1984 album The Unforgettable Fire. “Early morning, April 4/ Shot rings out in the Memphis sky,” sings Bono—except King was shot at 6:01pm local time. Bono has openly acknowledged the error over the years. Days of Ash, even as a minor entry in their sprawling discography, belongs to this unforgettable tradition of fiery imperfection.
What pulls the EP back from greatness is something that critics have long said about U2—they aim to please, sometimes too hard. This quality has made them the biggest band in the world, turning even a misfire like Songs of Experience into the sixth bestselling album in 2017. ‘Yours Eternally’, the closing track of Days of Ash, features the artist who topped the charts that year: Ed Sheeran.
There is a case to be made that Sheeran’s presence here is a shameless concession to commerciality, one that somewhat dims the EP’s impact—but then, U2 has always been U2. “Forget whatever doesn’t fit/ Regret, regret none of it,” go the lines, “Don’t bet on getting rid of me/ Yours eternally.”
Days of Ash may be an Irish stew of a half-album, but it has put U2 firmly back on the map.