The first sound on Carnaval De Luz is the buzz of Go (Carnaval De Luz), an opener Rolling Stone heard as influenced by the New York duo Suicide rather than by The Joshua Tree, and it signals that U2 did not want to make a careful record. The band’s 16th studio album, out today, is their first collection of new songs in nine years, and it closes on something no other record can offer: the final vocal performance by Dolly Parton, who died in August.
Between those two points sit 12 tracks produced by Garret “Jacknife” Lee, punk bursts, soca grooves, three Brian Eno co-writes and a pedal steel part from Daniel Lanois. Here is what U2 recorded, who helped, and where the album leads next.
Fifty Years After a Dublin Kitchen
The timing is deliberate. U2 first played together in Larry Mullen Jr.’s kitchen in Dublin on 25 September 1976, and the band announced Carnaval De Luz in September as the record marking their 50th year, Rolling Stone reported. It is the follow-up to 2017’s Songs of Experience, and Lee, who has worked with the band since 2004’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, produced it.
It is also the last piece of an unusually busy year. Earlier in 2026 U2 surprise-released two EPs, Days of Ash and Easter Lily, and they turn out to be linked to the album through the church calendar: carnival comes before Lent and Easter. Taken together, the three releases add up to 24 new songs. “It’s an extraordinary collection of songs,” bassist Adam Clayton told Rolling Stone, “and it’s the culmination of the work that everyone has been doing for 50 years.”
Lee told the magazine he had never seen a band work with so much intensity, and that the band recorded more in this period than in any other of their career. Much of that energy came from Mullen’s return to the studio after a debilitating neck injury. “I couldn’t play. I didn’t think I’d play again. So there was a renewed energy when we got into the studio,” the drummer said.
A Punk Opener and a Louder Bass
The opener, Go (Carnaval De Luz), is the wildest U2 recording in years by Rolling Stone’s account, and The Globe and Mail’s critic Brad Wheeler wrote that it races out of the gates like Deep Purple’s Highway Star on jet fuel. “It’s a statement of intent,” The Edge told Rolling Stone. “Whatever you thought you were gonna hear when you put on the new U2 album, you were not expecting this.”
The second single, Silencio, keeps the pressure up. Rolling Stone described it as a concise, raging punk tune, and its video was shot in a Mexican dance hall in Mexico City and directed by the Mexican American duo Cliqua, according to Billboard. Ryan Tedder is credited with additional production on the track.
The rhythm section is mixed forward. “The bass, I think, is louder than it’s been on the more recent records,” Clayton said, adding that it would be fun to play live. The Edge, meanwhile, pointed to a small change in his kit that guitar players will notice: the album features the first use of flat-wound strings on a U2 recording. He called the record “a messy, provocative, sacred collection of songs” in the band’s announcement.
Where the Familiar U2 Sound Returns
The punk edges are not the whole record. Wheeler heard the second track, La Reina, as a cousin of the 1991 hit Even Better Than the Real Thing, and noted that The Edge’s wind-chime rhythm guitar pops up here and there while Clayton’s bass lines, in his words, still move mountains. In his review for The Globe and Mail, a Critic’s Pick, he described what fans get as close to a greatest hits in sound, delivered by a humbled band.
Some of it is new ground. The lead single, Street of Dreams, rides soca grooves, a rhythm from Caribbean carnival culture that fits the album’s theme. If the World Is at War We Better Not Be sets robotic harmony vocals over a minimal, shimmering track. The Mirror Maker carries Rosalía’s name in its title because she inspired it, though a band spokesperson told Billboard she does not sing on it.
Bono framed the whole record as a carnival barker would. In the announcement he promised loud guitars, deep bass and ecstatic rhythms, and closed with a line that doubles as the album’s thesis: “if the world is in darkness we better not be.” The religious threads that have run through U2’s catalogue since the early 1980s are here too, and Wheeler read the album as the band returning to the vision quest of 1987’s The Joshua Tree.
The Collaborators Behind the Credits
The credits read like a map of the band’s history. Longtime collaborator Brian Eno co-wrote and played synthesisers on three tracks: Go (Carnaval De Luz), The Greatest Show on Earth and Can’t Stop Us Now, according to Rock Cellar Magazine. Another longtime associate, Daniel Lanois, adds pedal steel to the closing track.
The newer names come from outside rock. DJ and producer Martin Garrix has a writing credit on Glorify, Tedder brought his pop production to Silencio, and Snow Patrol’s Johnny McDaid co-wrote the final song. The mix of old and new names matches the range of the album itself.
The full running order is Go (Carnaval De Luz), La Reina, Street of Dreams, The Mirror Maker (Rosalía), Superficiality, If the World Is at War We Better Not Be, Silencio, The Greatest Show on Earth, Glorify, Midnight Sunshine, Can’t Stop Us Now and Torn.
Torn and Dolly Parton’s Last Recording
Torn is the song most listeners will go to first. It features the final vocal performance from Dolly Parton, who died in August, and it was co-written by the band, Parton and McDaid. The band’s description calls it a tender country song about broken family ties that holds wider resonances, and it also connects the album back to the two EPs released earlier in the year.
Wheeler called it a poignant duet, with Parton’s fluttering vocal set against muffled beats, heavenly brass and a church organ, and Lanois’s pedal steel ties it to the country tradition Parton came from. It is an unlikely meeting on paper, a Dublin rock band and one of the most famous voices in country music, and the song closes the record on a quieter note after the punk rush of the opening tracks.
For many fans the track will be heard as a farewell as much as a collaboration. Its placement as the last of the 12 songs gives Carnaval De Luz a shape that a band in its 50th year clearly thought about.
From a Thanksgiving Halftime Show to a 2027 Stadium Run
The album launches straight into a public run. U2 are due to headline the halftime show at the NFL’s first Thanksgiving Eve game this month, according to the press release cited by The Globe and Mail, and The Greatest Show on Earth arrived in October with news of a world tour for 2027.
That tour opens in Latin America, where demand has already added dates. Three shows at Estadio GNP Seguros in Mexico City sold out and a fourth was added for 2 March; São Paulo’s Estádio MorumBIS gained a fourth night on 16 March after three sold out; and Buenos Aires added a third date at Estadio River Plate on 27 March. The European leg runs from two nights in Stockholm in late April through Lisbon, two nights in Amsterdam and two nights at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London on 18 and 19 June, before closing at the Olympiastadion in Berlin on 30 June.
How Carnaval De Luz Sits in the Catalogue
Heritage acts have spent 2026 proving they still have new music in them, not only archive material. On this site that has ranged from Phil Lynott’s shelved solo album surfacing in an eight-CD box set to fresh recordings from bands decades into their careers. U2’s answer is a record that reaches back to the punk energy of their first rehearsals while keeping the arena-scale melodies of their biggest years.
The Edge summed up the band’s mood when he told Rolling Stone there is no complacency, only “the same old struggle”, and that if making records ever got easy the music would sound like that. Fifty years after a kitchen rehearsal in Dublin, Carnaval De Luz is the sound of a band that still wants the struggle, and it ends with a goodbye few records could offer.
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