‘We’re going to offend & annoy people… but that’s our job’ says Bono in first look at U2’s biting new EP Days Of Ash

BONO calls the times we live in “mad and maddening”.

He says that “we need to stand up to them before we can go back to having faith in the future. And each other.”

A quick glance at our small screens confirms the U2 singer’s belief that the world has shifted on its axis – and not in a good way.

It helps explain why the enduring Irish rock icons, never afraid to allow geopolitics into their work, have responded in song.

The six-track Days Of Ash EP, released today on Ash Wednesday, is their most dramatic and biting new music offering in years.

Styled as “postcards from the present”, subjects covered in this powerful defence of basic human freedoms include…

Putin’s relentless war on Ukraine, the Israel/Palestine bloodshed, the brutal repression in Iran and shocking state-sponsored killing in Minneapolis.

These are not just broad brushstrokes. They are presented through the prism of individuals – an American mother, a Palestinian father, an Iranian teenage girl and a Ukrainian soldier.

Bono, 65, says: “All the songs on Days Of Ash are of the moment we wish we weren’t in… but are.

“They are songs of defiance and dismay, of lamentation.”

While promising “songs of celebration” with a “carnival” atmosphere on a new studio album later in the year, he says: “These songs were impatient to be out in the world. They couldn’t wait.”

I guess Bono accepts that not everyone sees the world through his lens – or that they simply don’t want his views rammed down their throats – and that he expects to draw fire.

But he argues: “The songs being presented here are all reactions to present day anxieties – some knee-jerk, some more considered – all likely to offend or annoy some parties, but that’s kind of our job!”

It’s not the first time in their 50-year career that U2 have been moved by current events.

Upon its release in 1983, Sunday Bloody Sunday defied the odds to become a peace anthem during the Northern Irish Troubles.

Then, in 1997, One helped bring a spirit of unity to the people of Bosnia at a concert in the war-torn country’s capital, Sarajevo.

In 2023, the band put out a rewritten version of Walk On to serve as a rallying cry for Ukraine.

Now, in 2026, with their first significant body of new songs since 2017, Bono says: “We’d like to think this (Days Of Ash) EP is at war with the reasons people end up at any frontline.

“We all (in the band) bring what we’ve got and these five songs and a poem are what we’ve got – right now.

“They’re portraits from those we in U2 see at the frontline of freedom. For those of us not living on that frontline, we should be so grateful to those who are…

“One can never write a song to do justice to lives like these, but you can try.”

Accompanying the music is a new one-off edition (in digital and limited print form) of Propaganda, the U2 fan magazine which first appeared 40 years ago.

I’ve been given a sneak preview of its contents including an illuminating interview by Martin Wroe with Bono as well as the thoughts of Edge, bassist Adam Clayton and dummer Larry Mullen Jr.

Bono maintains that “it’s also part of U2’s job to describe the world around us – what you might call our exterior life as well as the interior one that I – we – have been documenting on more recent projects.”

Edge delivers a stirring mission statement which begins: “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.”

Clayton tells of “a lesson I’m learning”, which he describes as “tolerance, freedom and choosing not to jump to judgment.”

He adds: “I see how significant this is in the themes at play on Day Of Ash.

“I’m excited about these new songs. It feels like they’re arriving at the right time.”

Mullen Jr, back in the fold after surgery on an injury, knows that when U2 stick their heads above the parapet, there are consequences.

“Who needs to hear a new record from us?” he asks. “It just depends on whether we’re making music we feel deserves to be heard.

“I believe these new songs stand up to our best work.”

Remembering how the band have championed causes in the past, he adds: “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.”

So let’s take a deep dive into the six tracks, beginning, just as Bono does in his interview, with the last of them – the breezy and most pop-oriented Yours Eternally.

It finds the frontman and The Edge joined on vocals by musician turned Ukrainian soldier Taras Topilia and Ed Sheeran, credited with bringing the band and Taras together.

Some of you may recall pictures of the U2 pair busking in a Kyiv metro station in the spring of 2022 in the wake of the Russian invasion.

That was the first time they met Taras and his band Antytila and now there’s a song inspired by him, written in the form of a letter from a soldier on the frontline.

Bono says: “Ed had given me Taras’ number, but when I called him he wasn’t that receptive to taking my call. In fact he hung up on me.

“Turns out he was on manoeuvres with the Ukrainian Defence Forces and not exactly in the frame of mind to discuss music!”

The response from Taras went something like this: “Sorry, who is this? Bono? No can’t speak right now, call you back I hope. Nothing personal… I’m a bit busy.”

But, as Bono stresses: “When we did eventually speak, we hit it off.”

Of the tyrant behind the invasion, he adds: “Ask anyone in east Germany or Poland or Latvia if they think Putin will stop at Ukraine if he can get away with it. 

“He’d find an excuse to invade Ireland if it suited his purposes.”

Bono also gives fascinating insights into how Ed Sheeran ended up providing vocals on Yours Eternally.

He says: “Only in the last few years have we gotten to know Ed and his wife Cherry. She’s a serious person – fun – but a serious climate activist.

“Ed is a whirling dervish of a talent. High energy which he can turn on easier than he can turn off.

“I see a lot of my younger self in Ed, although he takes himself a little less seriously than I took myself at his age.”

When it came to recording Yours Eternally, Bono recalls how Sheeran said, “I love the song, I love Ukraine but I’d rather not be part of any political polemic right now.”

“You’re not, I told him. I might have been bluffing there.”

Yours Eternally is accompanied by a short minute film from the frontline, directed by Ukrainian Ilya Mikhaylus, released next Tuesday – the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion.

So what about the other Days Of Ash songs? Opener American Obituary, the last to be recorded, started life the day after peaceful protester Renee Nicole Macklin Good, a 37-year-old mum of three, was shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.

A searing slice of punk rock redolent of U2’s early forays, it’s all angular Edge guitar and a mixture of rage and tears.

“U2’s been banging on about America for most of our artistic life,” says Bono, referencing The Joshua Tree and Rattle & Hum era in particular. “This is a country we love and has loved us back.”

Yet he insists: “American Obituary is a song of fury and, more than that, a song of grief. Not just for Renee but for the death of an America that would have had an inquiry into her killing.”

He adds that the rhythm of the lyric is a nod to one of his fave Bob Dylan songs, It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).

It contains two memorable lines, one borrowed from Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim, “The power of the people is so much stronger than the people in power,” and the other being, “We love you more than hate loves war.”

This brings us to Song Of The Future, written in honour of 16-year-old Iranian schoolgirl Sarina Esmailzadeh, one of thousands like her who took to the streets for the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in 2022 to protest after another young woman, Jina Amini, died in custody for not wearing a hijab.

Sarina was arrested and beaten by Iranian security forces. She died from her injuries with the regime claiming she killed herself.

Bono says: “Song Of The Future is, we hope, an uplifting enough pop song to honour the schoolgirl uprising in Iran.

“The song, like the movement that inspired it, ends on a sour note as it so was so brutally crushed.”

The recent demonstrations which began on December 28, and were so brutally crushed, bring Song Of The Future into even sharper relief.

As Bono reports: “Six thousand of the country’s best and brightest were killed.”

This takes him on to One Life At A Time, written for Awdah Hathaleen, a Palestinian nonviolent activist, English teacher and father of three, killed in the West Bank by a fundamentalist Israeli settler.

Bono says the song “is our attempt to offer up a beautiful melody and, I hope, some kind of balm, inspired by an extraordinary Palestinian man.”

Preceding One Life At A Time is a short poem, Wildpeace, by Israeli writer Yehuda Amichai, read by Nigerian artist Adeola against a musical backdrop provided by U2 and their long-time associate Jacknife Lee.

“I can hardly listen to her (Adeola’s) voice… it cuts right through me,” affirms Bono.

“Somehow it suggests other conflicts on the African continent just by the lilt of her achingly beautiful voice. Sudan, dear God.”

The Days Of Ash is completed by a yearning ballad, The Tears Of Things, beginning with acoustic strums and Bono’s voice at its raw intimate best.

It borrows its title from a book by a Franciscan friar Richard Rohr, which examines how, says Bono, “the greatest of Jewish prophets found a way to push through their rage and anger at the injustices, until they ended up in tears.”

It references Michelangelo’s 17-foot marble statue of the Bible’s King David – known today as The David – and suggests that he might have been given heart-shaped eyes “because at some point he needed to cry”.

Today, there are many reasons to cry in this uncertain world but also to love and laugh.

U2, like them or not, are DEMANDING your attention in the spirit of peace, freedom and hope.