The Long Burn: U2, Days of Ash, and Forty-Five Years of Protest
They opened with a white flag and a military snare. They survived irony, iTunes scandals, Las Vegas spectacle, and accusations of self-importance. Now, on Ash Wednesday 2026, they have released six of the most direct songs of their career.
This is the full story of how U2 became a protest band, what nearly broke them, and why Days of Ash may be the record that justifies everything.
There is a note that changed everything.
In September 1976, a fourteen-year-old drummer named Larry Mullen Jr. posted it on the bulletin board of Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Artane, north Dublin, looking for musicians to form a band.
What gathered in the Mullen family kitchen that afternoon was, in hindsight, improbable. Paul Hewson, already known as Bono, could not really sing. Dave Evans, who would become the Edge, was the son of a Welsh Church of Wales family transplanted to Dublin.
Adam Clayton was English-born, the most secular of the group, the one who understood rock and roll as a social posture rather than a spiritual vocation. None of them could play particularly well. What they had instead was something harder to name and much harder to manufacture: a shared urgency that felt, even then, like it was about more than music.
Four and a half decades later, on 18 February 2026, those same four men, or three of them plus the ghost of a dynamic that has survived everything thrown at it, released an EP called Days of Ash.
Six songs.
No stadium apparatus.
No elaborately branded world tour announced.
Just the songs, named for specific people, addressed to a specific world, refusing every available exit toward comfort or abstraction. The date was not accidental. Ash Wednesday. The day Christians are marked on the forehead with the burnt remnant of last year's palms: a reminder that everything ends, that mortality is not theoretical, that the body you inhabit is dust practising.
For a band that has threaded scripture, protest, and poetry together since their earliest records, the symbolism was not decoration.
It was the point.
To understand what Days of Ash is and what it costs to have made it, you need to trace the line from that kitchen in Artane to this EP. It is not a straight line. It passes through Belfast, through Central America, through Berlin, through a golden arch in Las Vegas, through a tax controversy that nearly destroyed their credibility, through a moment when Apple silently deposited an album nobody asked for into half a billion strangers' libraries.
It passes through the deaths of people they loved and the survival of causes they championed and the failure of others. The line is crooked and sometimes it disappears entirely, but it has never completely broken. What follows is an attempt to trace it from the beginning.
Before the Band: The City That Made Them
Bono was eleven years old on 30 January 1972.
He was living in Cedarwood Road in Ballymun, north Dublin, in a house where his Protestant mother Iris and his Catholic father Bob had constructed a domestic peace that the rest of the country had not managed at national scale. Two hundred kilometres to the north, in the city of Derry, British paratroopers of the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment shot and killed fourteen unarmed civilians attending a civil rights march. Five of the dead were seventeen years old. The youngest was seventeen.
The event entered history as Bloody Sunday.
Bono would not write about it for another decade. When he did, the song would open with a question delivered over a military snare: how long must we sing this song? The answer implied by the rest of the song's existence was: longer than you would think necessary, longer than is comfortable, for as long as it takes for something to change. It has been forty-three years since that record was released. The question has not been retired.
The band's formation in 1976 coincided with the worst years of the Troubles. The daily news of the island they lived on was bomb attacks, shootings, hunger strikes, and the grinding machinery of a conflict that had been going for longer than any of them had been alive. Three of the four members, Bono, the Edge, and Larry Mullen, became involved in 1981 with a Christian charismatic fellowship in Dublin called Shalom, a commitment that nearly ended the band before it had properly begun.
he fellowship questioned whether popular music was compatible with a life of faith. For a period of genuine uncertainty, the future of U2 hung on whether three of its members would answer no. They did not. But the wrestling left marks that you can hear in every record they have made since. The faith never went away. It went underground, into the language and the imagery and the moral framework that makes U2 unlike any other rock band in history.
War: The Protest Impulse Fully Formed
The third album was called War. It was released in February 1983 and it announced, to anyone who had not been paying attention, that this was not an ordinary rock band. The opening track, Sunday Bloody Sunday, began with Larry Mullen's military snare: a beat that placed you, before a word was sung, inside the sound of confrontation. The choice was deliberate. Bono's instruction from concert stages, delivered while waving a white flag borrowed from a roadie named Greg Carroll, was insistent: this is not a rebel song. The distinction mattered in ways that the rest of the world may not have fully understood.
Irish rock had a complicated relationship with republican tradition. The repertoire of rebel ballads, songs celebrating armed resistance to British rule, was a living part of the musical culture that any Irish rock band had to consciously navigate. U2 did not want to be about one side's grievances. They wanted to ask why any of this was still happening at all. The white flag was a refusal to enlist. Sunday Bloody Sunday was a song that named the event, felt the fury, and refused to assign it to the service of any armed faction.
This was, in the context of 1983 and the ongoing Troubles, a more difficult and more honest position than the obvious alternatives.
New Year's Day looked further afield: to Poland, to the Solidarity movement, to the detention of Lech Walesa under martial law in a Warsaw winter that felt like the whole darkness of the twentieth century distilled. The song was also a love song. This was the first full expression of what would become the U2 signature move: the global event refracted through the personal, the political made bearable by the presence of another human being within it. It is a technique that prevents protest from becoming mere agitprop, and it is what has kept their best songs alive long after the specific events they addressed have moved from news to history.
The white flag was a refusal to enlist. Sunday Bloody Sunday named the event, felt the fury, and refused to assign that fury to the service of any armed faction. In 1983, that was the harder and more honest position.
The album was received by British critics with a suspicion bordering on hostility. The sincerity was too naked. The NME and Melody Maker, the arbiters of taste in British rock at that moment, were in the late stages of post-punk irony and the cold precision of synth pop. U2 arrived in opposition to all of it, playing loud guitars and waving flags and asking questions that did not have clever answers. They were called grandiose. The word earnest was used as a pejorative so consistently it became a kind of critical nervous tic whenever U2 were discussed. The album went to number one in the United Kingdom. The audience, as it turned out, had not been waiting for irony.
The Joshua Tree and the American Reckoning
By 1987 U2 were the biggest band in the world in a way that only a handful of acts in rock history have been simultaneously artistic and commercial at the highest level. The Joshua Tree was the record that achieved it, and it remains the most fully realised statement they have made about the relationship between what a place promises and what it delivers. The tension it holds between love and indictment, between the ache of aspiration and the anger of betrayal, is what makes it more than a protest album. It is a great album that contains protest within it.
The political content emerged directly from Bono's experience. In 1986, he and his wife Ali Stewart spent time in Central America working with relief organisations in El Salvador and Nicaragua, regions where American foreign policy was deeply entangled with regimes and proxy forces responsible for mass civilian casualties. What he witnessed there became Bullet the Blue Sky, the most viscerally angry thing in the U2 catalogue. The Edge's guitar in that track descends through the song like something being torn apart. It sounds like ordnance. It sounds like the noise the world makes before it ends for someone. The lyric names Jacob and the angel, names the rain, names the dollar bill, refuses to be anything except what it is: a direct accusation addressed to American power.
But The Joshua Tree also contains Where the Streets Have No Name and I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, which are not protest songs at all. They are songs of longing, of the permanent gap between what we can imagine and what we can reach. The album holds both of these emotional registers at once: the fury and the yearning, the indictment and the love. This is its genius and its complexity. You cannot reduce it to a political statement without losing most of what makes it matter.
Mothers of the Disappeared, which closes The Joshua Tree, was inspired by Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo: Argentine women who gathered every Thursday in Buenos Aires to bear witness to the state murder of their children during the military junta's Dirty War of 1976 to 1983. An estimated 30,000 people were killed or disappeared by the regime. The Mothers began their weekly vigils in 1977 and continued them for decades, becoming one of the most sustained acts of public mourning and political protest in modern history. U2 performed the song on the Amnesty International Conspiracy of Hope tour in 1986, with several of the Mothers present in the audience. The song is quiet and almost unbearably sad: the complement to Bullet the Blue Sky's rage, both responses to the same category of event.
Achtung Baby: Surviving Themselves Through Irony
Before Achtung Baby there was Rattle and Hum, and Rattle and Hum was the moment U2's credibility account registered its first significant overdraft. The 1988 documentary and album were conceived as a homage to American roots music, to the blues and gospel and country traditions that had shaped rock and roll before rock and roll forgot them. The instinct was genuine. The execution was not. The image of Bono arriving at Graceland, recording in Sun Studio, performing with B.B. King, taking a spray can to the Berlin Wall for a music video: all of it carried a whiff of self-coronation that critics found impossible to ignore. The NME printed the words "How to Dismantle an Inflated Ego" on its cover. It was savage and not entirely unfair, and the band knew it.
The sessions for Achtung Baby began in Berlin in October 1990, weeks after German reunification, at Hansa Tonstudio, the studio where David Bowie and Brian Eno had recorded Heroes in 1977, where the sound of the divided city had been turned into one of the most enduring records of the century. The band arrived in a state of crisis. The Edge was going through the collapse of his first marriage. The creative direction was entirely unclear. Adam Clayton would later describe days when the band were in separate rooms, unable to agree on a single bar of music. There were serious conversations about whether U2 should continue to exist.
What emerged from this wreckage is regarded by many critics as the best record U2 have made. It adopted irony as a survival mechanism: after a decade of earnest flag-waving, the band decided to interrogate their own earnestness, to put their self-importance in a gold suit and a pair of platform shoes and call it MacPhisto. The Zoo TV tour, with its hundreds of television screens and satellite uplinks and prank calls to the White House from the stage, was the most sophisticated piece of media criticism that a rock concert has ever attempted. The spectacle was the message: we live in a world of infinite images and zero attention, and the way to survive it may be to become more spectacular than anything trying to drown you out.
The political content survived the reinvention, transformed. During the Zoo TV tour Bono made nightly calls from the stage to Sarajevo, where a city was under siege and people were being murdered in their streets while the rest of Europe watched television. The juxtaposition of the spectacle and the suffering was not accidental. It was a statement about desensitisation that was a decade ahead of its time and that has only become more relevant. The lesson of Zoo TV was that you can use the tools of distraction to direct attention. It was a lesson that influenced everything from political messaging to social media strategy for the two decades that followed.
The Long Contradiction: Activism, Tax, and iTunes
The first decade and a half of the 21st century produced U2's most sustained period of commercial success and the most serious damage to their critical and moral standing. The music, particularly How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004) and No Line on the Horizon (2009), had moments of genuine quality alongside passages that felt like the work of a band executing a formula they had mastered so completely that it no longer cost them anything. Mastery that is costless is not interesting to watch.
More corrosive was the accumulation of contradictions around Bono's public activism. Since the late 1990s he had been working seriously on debt relief and AIDS advocacy in sub-Saharan Africa, co-founding the DATA organisation and the ONE Campaign, lobbying G8 leaders with a persistence that achieved measurable results: documented debt cancellation agreements, increased aid commitments, accelerated access to antiretroviral medication. The work was real and its outcomes were real. And then the band moved part of their business operations to the Netherlands to reduce their Irish tax liability.
The gap between advocating for global poverty reduction and minimising contributions to the public revenue that funds social services was not lost on anyone. The band's response, that their commercial affairs were a separate matter from their advocacy, satisfied no one who was not already inclined to be satisfied. The criticism was not entirely fair, but it was not entirely unfair either. It was the kind of contradiction that wealthy activists have always generated, and U2 generated it at a scale that made it impossible to ignore.
Then, in September 2014, Apple without asking deposited Songs of Innocence directly into the libraries of 500 million iTunes users as a promotional exercise. The backlash was immediate and, in terms of its intensity relative to the actual harm done, disproportionate. But it was revealing. It was not about the music. It was about what the gesture implied: that a band which had spent four decades positioning themselves as the voice of the people had become an entity so confident in its own welcome that it could not conceive of the possibility that half a billion strangers might not want what it had to offer. The damage to U2's relationship with a significant portion of its potential audience was permanent.
The Sphere: Magnificent Retrospective
The Las Vegas Sphere residency, which ran across 2023 and 2024 under the name U2: UV Achtung Baby Live at the Sphere, was technically the most extraordinary thing U2 had ever done. The building's 160,000 square feet of interior LED surface allowed for audio-visual experiences that no previous concert technology had made possible. The show revisited Achtung Baby with a fidelity and scale that even hostile observers found difficult to dismiss. It grossed enormous sums. It was performed, due to Adam Clayton's injury, with a stand-in bassist named Bram van den Berg, which introduced an odd asterisk into the biography of one of rock's most enduring partnerships.
The Sphere was a celebration of something U2 did thirty-two years ago. It was magnificent. And it was, in the precise sense of the word, nostalgic. It looked backward at what the band had been. It said nothing about what the world was in 2023 or 2024. That is not nothing: the preservation and transmission of great work is a legitimate cultural function. But it is not the same thing as making something new that matters in the present tense. The Sphere show was a monument. Days of Ash is an argument.
Ash Wednesday: The Date as Statement
The release date of Days of Ash is itself a theological act. Ash Wednesday falls forty-six days before Easter and marks the beginning of Lent, the period of fasting and reflection that precedes the Christian celebration of resurrection. The liturgy of Ash Wednesday centres on a gesture: a priest marks a cross of ash on the forehead of each congregant and speaks the words from Genesis 3:19: remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. It is the most memento mori that institutional Christianity performs. Death is not abstract. It is personal. It is coming. Pay attention now.
For Bono, this context is not decorative. The theological literacy in U2's work is not the casual Christianity of bands that put a cross on the album sleeve to signify vague spirituality. It is specific and argued and wrestled with. October (1981) contains some of the most genuinely devotional rock lyrics ever written. The Joshua Tree is saturated with Old Testament imagery deployed with precision. Achtung Baby played with and against religious language in ways that required the knowledge to do so convincingly. All That You Can't Leave Behind (2000) is a meditation on grace and mortality that requires no theological dictionary to feel but rewards one if you bring it.
Days of Ash released on Ash Wednesday says: this music is ritual. It is not entertainment. It asks something of you. It marks you. It is a reminder, delivered in the form of six songs, that specific people have died, that specific violence is ongoing, that the world is on fire in ways that demand a response from anyone who has not decided that their own comfort is the only thing that matters.
The Songs: What They Name and Why It Matters
American Obituary
The EP opens with its most direct statement. American Obituary was written in response to the killing of Renée Nicole Good. The title carries accusation in every syllable. Obituary is the form you use when someone has died and you want the record to acknowledge it. Applying it to America rather than to the individual is the choice that contains the song's argument: what died is not only a person but something about the country that claimed to stand for her safety.
Renée Nicole Good was killed by a US Border Patrol agent in 2022 after being involved in a vehicle incident near the US-Mexico border. Her death, and the circumstances surrounding it, became part of a broader conversation about the use of lethal force by federal agents against civilians and the systems of accountability, or the absence of them, that govern those decisions. She was a mother. She had a name. U2's decision to use that name in a song is an act of witness: the named individual as the unit of moral attention that generalisation destroys.
In the lineage of Sunday Bloody Sunday, the song confronts state violence without flinching from its specificity. But the tone is different from 1983. Then, Bono sounded incredulous: furious at inherited bloodshed, uncomprehending of how cycles of violence sustain themselves. In 2026 the anger has been tempered by forty-three years of watching cycles repeat. It is sharper. It has less of the quality of surprise. A man who was furious at twenty-two is furious at sixty-five in a different way: the indignation is the same but it has been sharpened by the accumulated weight of knowing that the song has had to be sung again.
The Edge's guitar work reportedly returns to a percussive urgency that recalls the War era rather than the arena gloss of the 2000s records. This matters as a signal. In U2, the guitar is the political barometer. When it chimes and ascends, the band is in aspirational mode: pointing toward what could be. When it grinds and distorts, they are in indictment mode: pointing at what is wrong. The sound of American Obituary suggests the second register has fully re-engaged.
The Tears of Things
If the opening track is a clenched fist, The Tears of Things is an open hand. The title is drawn from a phrase associated with Richard Rohr, the Franciscan friar and contemplative theologian whose writing on grief, transformation, and the spiritual function of suffering has influenced Bono's thinking for years. Rohr's framework argues that suffering entered with full attention, without the anaesthesia of denial or the shortcut of premature resolution, is the only path through to genuine transformation. The tears of things is his way of naming the grief that is not personalised, the sorrow that is not about you specifically but about the weight of being human in a world that generates suffering continuously.
The song is structured around an imagined dialogue between Michelangelo's David and the sculptor who made him. This is a device that allows the song to do what U2's best protest work has always done: find the human scale inside the historical event. David is not only a marble statue. He is the figure of someone about to enter a fight they should not be able to win, armed only with what they can carry. The dialogue between the made thing and its maker, between the symbol and the person who shaped the symbol into being, is a way of thinking about the relationship between art and the world it addresses: what art owes to reality, what reality owes to the people who refuse to look away from it.
In the U2 canon, this track belongs to the tradition of Moment of Surrender and the closing passages of With or Without You: music that understands outrage without transcendence as incomplete, that insists the emotional range available to protest is wider than anger. Compassion is not weakness. It is, in the framework the song inhabits, a form of resistance: the refusal to become as cold as the thing you are opposing.
Song of the Future
Dedicated to Sarina Esmailzadeh, Song of the Future places youth at the centre of political struggle and acknowledges what it costs them to be there.
Sarina Esmailzadeh was a sixteen-year-old Iranian girl who was killed by security forces during the protests that erupted in Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini in September 2022. Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, died after being detained by the morality police for allegedly violating the country's mandatory hijab law.
The protests that followed, under the slogan Woman, Life, Freedom, were the largest sustained challenge to the Islamic Republic since its founding. Sarina Esmailzadeh was among the youngest of the protesters killed. She had been documenting the protests on social media. She was sixteen.
U2 were teenagers when they wrote New Year's Day and Pride (In the Name of Love). They embodied the future they were singing about. That embodiment is not available to men in their mid-sixties. The dedication to Sarina Esmailzadeh is an acknowledgment of what has passed and what has been handed on, and the weight of what is being carried by people who should not yet have to carry it. The title is double: it is a song about the future, and it is a song offered to the future, to people younger than the band's oldest children, who are doing the work the band once claimed as their own.
Wildpeace
Setting Yehuda Amichai's poem to music is the EP's most structurally unexpected choice. Amichai was an Israeli poet, born in Germany in 1924, brought to Palestine by his family in 1936, and recognised by the time of his death in 2000 as one of the most important Hebrew-language poets of the century. His work is characterised by a domestication of the epic: the enormous events of Jewish and Israeli history rendered in ordinary objects, everyday relationships, the detail of the particular life lived against the backdrop of collective catastrophe.
The Wildpeace poem describes a peace that is not the peace of official negotiations or formal gestures but something more immediate and less ceremonial: peace as the condition in which ordinary life can simply occur. A man and a woman, a child, the ordinary transactions of a day that does not contain violence. The choice to set it, spoken over atmospheric instrumentation, is a refusal of the anthem form. No soaring chorus. No stadium architecture. The EP needed a hinge between the specific tragedies of the other tracks and something larger, and Amichai provided it.
The precedent in U2's work is Miss Sarajevo, recorded during the Zoo TV era with Brian Eno and Luciano Pavarotti, which widened the frame from rock to something closer to art song. Wildpeace does something similar: it insists that the available registers for thinking about peace include the meditative, the intimate, and the literary, not only the anthemic and the political. Given that the poem comes from an Israeli writer, its placement on an EP that elsewhere addresses Palestinian suffering invites the listener to hold complexity rather than resolve it. This is, in its own way, a political act.
One Life at a Time
Inspired by Awdah Hathaleen, One Life at a Time is among the most restrained pieces U2 have ever recorded.
Awdah Hathaleen was a Palestinian activist and shepherd from the village of Umm al-Kheir in the South Hebron Hills of the West Bank. He was an internationally recognised defender of his community's land rights, a man who documented the demolition of homes and the eviction of his neighbours with patient, quiet persistence for years. He was killed in a road incident involving an Israeli settler vehicle in January 2024. He was not a political leader or a combatant. He was a man who paid attention to what was happening to people around him and refused to stop bearing witness to it. He had a name.
The title is the song's argument compressed to four words. In a world saturated with statistical suffering, where the news cycle processes mass casualties and returns to normal before the bodies are buried, the insistence on the single life as the irreducible unit of moral attention is a radical act. The Mothers of the Disappeared understood this. Bono's practice of naming specific people rather than invoking abstract groups, which began in earnest on War and which Days of Ash has made systematic, comes from the same understanding. The individual cannot be allowed to dissolve into the aggregate. This is the task: to hold the individual visible against the pressure of scale.
Yours Eternally
The closing track features two collaborators, and the combination is not accidental. Ed Sheeran is the largest-selling solo artist of his generation, a man whose presence on a record guarantees an audience that extends far beyond U2's existing base. Taras Topolia is the frontman and guitarist of Antytila, one of Ukraine's most beloved rock bands, who have spent the years since the Russian invasion of 2022 performing concerts at frontline positions, organising humanitarian relief, and serving in the Ukrainian military.
Antytila formed in Kyiv in 2007 and became one of Ukraine's most significant rock acts, known for energetic live performances and a sound that blended rock with electronic elements. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Topolia and the band did not leave the country. They enlisted and served in the territorial defence forces while continuing to perform concerts for soldiers near the front lines, sometimes under active threat. Topolia has spoken about the experience of playing music twenty kilometres from artillery exchanges. He has also spoken about friends and fellow musicians who were killed. His presence on a U2 record in 2026, as a man still living inside the war that the song describes, is not symbolic. It is direct testimony.
The letter format of Yours Eternally, the epistolary framing of conflict as personal correspondence, collapses the distance between geopolitics and the human being writing and receiving it. This is what letters do: they make the abstract specific by locating it in the voice of one person addressed to another. The song closes the EP not with resolution but with endurance, not with the claim that things will be fine but with the commitment to remain in correspondence regardless. Love under siege. The vow made in conditions designed to break it.
The pairing of Sheeran and Topolia, the commercially dominant voice of global pop alongside the man who has been sleeping in a country at war, is itself an argument: that the audience that loves Ed Sheeran should know who Taras Topolia is and what he represents, and that the two things can exist in the same space without one diminishing the other. This is the solidarity argument U2 have been making since Walk On: that attention is transferable, that the large platform carries an obligation to direct some of its light toward what it would otherwise leave in shadow.
What Ash Means: The Theology of a Title
The title of the EP, Days of Ash, earns examination that goes beyond the release date. Ash is aftermath. It is what remains when something that was alive and burning has finished burning. It is residue in the most precise sense: the physical evidence that something existed and no longer does, in the form in which it existed. It is also, in the Christian tradition of the liturgy Bono chose as his release date, mortality made visible. The forehead marked with ash is the body reminded of its own ending.
Across the six songs, ash becomes the connective tissue. Rage burns and leaves ash. Grief sifts through ash looking for what can be recovered. Hope finds itself described as something that glows beneath ash, still present, not yet extinguished, requiring only the right attention to become fire again. This is the theological structure that Bono has always worked within: not the easy theology of victory and certainty but the harder theology of the long dark, the held vigil, the faith that survives the absence of evidence by refusing to confuse the absence of evidence with the evidence of absence.
Richard Rohr, whose phrase provides the title of the EP's second track, has written extensively about what he calls the paschal mystery: the cycle of death and resurrection not as a one-time historical event but as the structure of all genuine transformation, including political transformation. Things have to die before they can change.
The dying is real and should not be minimised.
The ash is real ash. But the tradition to which the EP dedicates itself, the tradition of marking the forehead and speaking the words of mortality as an act not of defeat but of reckoning, is a tradition that insists the dying is not the end of the story.
This is, in the end, what has sustained U2 through every credibility crisis and commercial overreach and artistic miscalculation of the past forty-five years: the unshakeable belief that the burning is not final, that what remains after the fire can be something other than just loss.
Does It Change Anything? The Question Protest Music Cannot Avoid
Sunday Bloody Sunday did not end the Troubles. Bullet the Blue Sky did not end American intervention in Central America. Walk On did not free Aung San Suu Kyi. The record of protest music as a direct lever on political events is not encouraging. Days of Ash will not stop the conflicts that generated its songs. Renée Nicole Good will not be brought back by an EP.
Sarina Esmailzadeh will not live again because Bono dedicated a song to her. The question of whether protest music does anything is a real question and it deserves a real answer rather than the comfortable deflection of saying that raising awareness is enough.
The honest answer is: rarely directly, and never immediately. But this may be the wrong measure. Protest music's function may not be to win specific campaigns. It may be to name what is happening at the precise moment when the machinery of normalisation is working hardest to make it seem that nothing unusual is occurring.
It may be to provide language and feeling for people who have both but lack the platform to make them audible.
It may be to create a record, in the archival sense, that future listeners can use to understand what the present felt like from inside: what it felt like to live in 2026 and to know the names Renée Nicole Good and Sarina Esmailzadeh and Awdah Hathaleen, to know those names and to be unable to look away.
The most damaging thing that can happen to a protest band is for the world to render it irrelevant. The most dangerous thing that can happen to a protest artist is for them to mistake their platform for their purpose. Days of Ash suggests, tentatively but unmistakably, that the purpose has reasserted itself.
U2 at their best have understood that art is a form of witness. At their worst they have confused the witness with the celebrity of the witness. The credibility crises of the 2000s and 2010s came from that confusion. The Sphere show, magnificent as it was, leaned on legacy at the expense of present tense. Days of Ash reads, on this initial evidence, as a record made by people who have shed some of the self-importance and retained the urgency.
That is a difficult thing to accomplish. It is more difficult at sixty-five than it was at twenty-two, when the urgency is indistinguishable from hunger and the self-importance has not yet had time to accumulate. The fact that the band appears to have managed it is not nothing. It may, in the context of everything they have been through, be everything.
The needle is moving. Four men from north Dublin, now in their mid-sixties, who have seen every cycle repeat, who know what it costs to be loud and what it means to be silent, who made a record about specific dead people and released it on the day the Church marks its congregants with the dust of last year's hope, are insisting that the burning is not finished.
Whether that insistence changes anything is a question only the world can answer. It has always been a question only the world can answer. The band's job is to keep asking it.
For complete lyrics to the EP, visit: Days of Ash EP Lyrics.
