U2 release politically-charged EP Days of Ash
U2 have announced their first collection of new music in almost a decade in a politically-charged five-track EP that includes the song ‘American Obituary’ on the shooting of Renee Good by ICE agents.
The ‘U2 – Days Of Ash’ EP is out now and it features a poem and new songs focused on global injustice.
A short documentary film to accompany the song ‘Yours Eternally’ (ft. Ed Sheeran & Taras Topolia) will be released on Tuesday, February, 24, the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It will be followed by a new album later this year, and marks the first new collection of music from the Dublin band since 2017’s Songs of Experience.
Pic: Han Myung-Gu/WireImage
Opening track ‘American Obituary’ is about the shooting of American woman Renée Good in Minneapolis last month by ICE agents, which the band described as the killing of ‘an unarmed mother who was then described as a “domestic terrorist” by the government’.
Many of the tracks are about individuals whose lives were brutally cut short, such as a Ukrainian soldier facing off against his country’s invasion.
The band has described the EP as about ‘the many extraordinary and courageous people fighting on the frontlines of freedom’, which Bono stated will strike a very different tone to the upcoming album set for a late-2026 release.
‘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,’ the frontman stated.
Pic: Anton Corbijn
‘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 normalised 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.’
The track ‘Yours Eternally’ sees Bono and The Edge joined on vocals by Ed Sheeran and Ukrainian musician-turned-soldier Taras Topolia, whom the band met while busking in a metro station in Kyiv on the invitation of President Zelensky.
The song is written in the form of a letter from a soldier on active duty and is accompanied by a short four-minute documentary shot last December, capturing Ukrainian soldiers fighting on the frontlines of the war.
Pic: Dave J Hogan/Dave J Hogan/Getty Images for MTV
The documentary is set to be released next Tuesday, 24 February, on the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Another track, Song of the Future, honours 16-year-old Sarina Esmailzadeh, who was beaten to death by Iranian security forces after taking part in a women’s rights protest in 2022.
Sarina passed away from her injuries, and the band have described the song as aiming to capture the schoolgirl’s ‘free spirit, the promise and hope of her short life’.
‘The Tears Of Things’ imagines a conversation between Michelangelo’s David and his creator, while ‘One Life At A Time’ is written for Awdah Hathaleen, a Palestinian father of three who was killed in his village in the West Bank by an Israeli settler last summer.
Awdah was a consultant on the Oscar- winning documentary ‘No Other Land,’ and the song title was inspired by a mourner at his funeral who said that Palestinians were being erased ‘one life at a time’.
The Days of Ash EP also includes a reading of the poem ‘Wildpeace’ by Israeli author and poet Yehuda Amichai, with music by U2 and producer Jacknife Lee.
It will be accompanied by a 52-page digital zine, with a limited-edition print run.
Drummer Larry Mullen Jr said that he believes the new songs ‘stand up to our best work’ and that the current global political climate called for a response through music.
‘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,’ he said.
‘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.’
