U2
The 12-track album arrives November 13, marking the Irish rock band’s first collection of new material in nine years
U2 are preparing to return with their first album of new material in nine years. Carnaval De Luz, the Irish rock band’s 16th studio album, is due November 13 via Island Records, and its arrival is accompanied by “Silencio,” a new single that finds Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen Jr. revisiting the irreverent energy of their earliest experiments while looking toward an uncertain future.
Produced by Jacknife Lee, the 12-track album arrives in the band’s 50th anniversary year, marking five decades since Mullen posted a notice on a bulletin board at Dublin’s Mount Temple Comprehensive School seeking musicians to form a band. The result, according to the group, is a collection concerned with spirituality, friendship, freedom, and the determination to keep creating in the face of darkness.
“It’s a messy, provocative, sacred collection of songs,” the Edge said in a statement, adding that the record features “the first-ever use of flat-wound strings on a U2 recording.”
Bono frames Carnaval De Luz as a celebration of imagination and resilience: “The same imagination that brings us our creativity can also bring us monsters. So we make the drums louder. We build a bigger fire. We make our stories wilder and funnier. We make the melodies sweeter and the songs, they better shine, because if the world is in darkness we better not be.”
That tension between spectacle and unease provides the album’s conceptual framework—its title evokes a carnival of light, a place of excess and exhilaration that exists in the shadow of something more threatening. The record also completes a creative arc begun with two surprise-released EPs earlier this year: Days Of Ash, released in February, and Easter Lily, which followed in April. Both projects explored the intersection of world events and private experience, moving between grief, friendship, hope, and renewal. Carnaval De Luz takes that sequence toward a more celebratory, physical register before the reflection and rebirth associated with Lent.
Musically, the album promises a range of approaches rather than a single defining sound. Opening track “Go (Carnaval De Luz)” establishes the record’s central atmosphere, while “The Greatest Show On Earth,” “Glorify,” and “Midnight Sunshine” highlight the band’s songwriting. “Silencio,” meanwhile, lasts just two minutes and 35 seconds, offering what the group describes as a sharp homage to the irreverence of early surf-punk. The politically charged “If The World Is At War We Better Not Be” brings the album’s broader search for light into sharper focus.
The record’s collaborators include several familiar names from U2’s history alongside contributors from outside the band’s traditional orbit. Brian Eno co-wrote and played synthesizers on “Go (Carnaval De Luz),” “The Greatest Show On Earth,” and “Can’t Stop Us Now.” Martin Garrix co-wrote “Glorify,” while Ryan Tedder contributed additional production to “Silencio.” Rosalía is credited in the title of “The Mirror Maker (Rosalía),” although further details of her contribution have not been specified in the announcement.
The album’s emotional centre may arrive at its conclusion—“Torn,” a tender country duet between Bono and Dolly Parton, is described as the late singer’s final recorded vocal performance. Co-written by U2, Parton, and Johnny McDaid, the song addresses broken family ties, with Daniel Lanois contributing pedal steel guitar. Its placement at the end of an album built around resilience and renewal gives the track an especially poignant significance.
U2 first previewed Carnaval De Luz with “Street Of Dreams,” released in July. The new single “Silencio” arrives alongside an official music video shot in Mexico City and directed by Cliqua, the Mexican-American directing duo of Pasqual Gutiérrez and Raúl “RJ” Sanchez.
For a band whose career has repeatedly involved balancing stadium-sized declarations with experiments in sound and form, Carnaval De Luz presents an intriguing premise: a record that treats celebration not as an escape from the darkness, but as a response to it. Whether its eclectic collaborators and stylistic shifts cohere into a new U2 statement remains to be heard. For now, the album’s central proposition is clear enough: when the world grows darker, turn up the drums.
Carnaval De Luz arrives November 13, 2026, via Island Records in digital, CD, and vinyl editions, including limited-edition deluxe box sets and coloured vinyl variants. “Silencio” is available now on streaming platforms and as a digital download.
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