U2 have surprise-released a new EP. It’s called Days of Ash, and it features five new songs as well as one poem by Yehuda Amichai. Four of them are about individuals whose lives were cut short, including Renée Good, Sarina Esmailzadeh, and Awdah Hathaleen. The closer, ‘Yours Eternally’, is a collaboration with Ed Sheeran and Taras Topolia (the Ukrainian singer with whom they performed in a Kyiv bomb shelter in 2022). Listen below.
‘Yours Eternally’ will be accompanied by a short documentary directed by Ukrainian filmmaker Ilya Mikhaylus. It’s set for release next week, on the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In a statement, Bono said:
It’s been a thrill having the four of us back together in the studio over the last year… the songs on Days of Ash are very different in mood and theme to the ones we’re going to put on our album later in the year. These EP tracks couldn’t wait; these songs were impatient to be out in the world. They are songs of defiance and dismay, of lamentation. Songs of celebration will follow, we’re working on those now… because for all the awfulness we see normalized daily on our small screens, there’s nothing normal about these mad and maddening times and we need to stand up to them before we can go back to having faith in the future. And each other.
“If you have a chance to hope it’s a duty…” is a line we borrowed from Lea Ypi.
A laugh would be nice too. Thank you.
Larry Mullen Jr. commented: “Who needs to hear a new record from us? 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. We talk a lot about when to release new tracks. You don’t always know… the way the world is now feels like the right moment. Going way back to our earliest days, working with Amnesty or Greenpeace, 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.”
“I’m excited about these new songs, it feels like they’re arriving at the right time,” Adam Clayton remarked.
And the Edge shared: “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. This belief isn’t temporary. It isn’t political fashion. It’s the ground we stand on. And we stand there together.”
