U2 are at their best when they act on instinct.

Their biggest songs are fuelled by fiery indignation (Pride, Sunday Bloody Sunday) or sudden inspiration (One, Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own).

When they overthink, they misfire. An attempt to marry grunge and hip-hop on the 2006 single Get On Your Boots was, in the words of drummer Larry Mullen Jr, “a catastrophic choice”.

So it was a good sign when, at the start of 2026, the band rushed out two EPs of new music, ripped from the headlines of a world in turmoil.

The first, Days of Ash, was urgent and angry – addressing the shooting of US citizen Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer; and the death of Palestinian activist Odeh Hathaleenm, who was allegedly killed by an Israeli settler. Yinon Levy has been charged with reckless manslaughter and said he would fight for his innocence in court.

U2’s follow-up, Easter Lily, was more reflective, asking whether faith and friendship are enough to sustain us in challenging times.

Together, they were the band’s strongest material in years, combining the combustive power of their early, post-punk incarnation with the melodic sophistication they developed in the late 1980s.

“We put those EPs out without telling anyone,” says Bono, the band’s voluble frontman.

“Our management, our label, they all said, ‘You can’t do that, people won’t notice’.

“And we said, ‘We don’t mind. It’s okay not to have a big hype behind everything’.

“And it was really beautiful. The people who we wanted to notice, noticed.”

For long-term U2 watchers, that’s a big shift.

This is the group who described their 2000 album All That You Can’t Leave Behind as the sound of four men “re-applying for the job of biggest band in the world”; and who forced 2014’s Songs of Innocence into 500 million people’s iTunes libraries – an epic act of overreach that Bono’s been apologising for ever, external since, external.