On Ash Wednesday — a date freighted with ritual and reckoning — U2 dropped Days of Ash, a surprise six-track EP that plays less like a teaser for a forthcoming album and more like a dispatch from the front lines. Released via Interscope Records, the project arrives ahead of a promised full-length later this year, but the band makes clear these songs “couldn’t wait.”
The EP pairs five new tracks with a musical reading of “Wildpeace,” a poem by Israeli writer Yehuda Amichai, delivered by Nigerian artist Adeola of Les Amazones d’Afrique over music by U2 and longtime collaborator Jacknife Lee. The remaining songs are stark character studies rooted in real-world trauma — mothers, fathers, teenagers, and soldiers caught in conflicts that feel both intimate and geopolitical.
“American Obituary” confronts the killing of Renée Nicole Macklin Good during a protest in Minneapolis earlier this year, framing the tragedy as both personal and constitutional. “Song of the Future” honors Sarina Esmailzadeh, a 16-year-old participant in Iran’s Woman, Life, Freedom movement, while “One Life at a Time” is dedicated to Palestinian activist Awdah Hathaleen, whose death in the West Bank reverberates through the song’s plea for incremental peace. The band’s language is direct: dignity is not negotiable; borders should not be erased by force.
The EP closes with “Yours Eternally,” a collaboration that stretches beyond studio walls. Bono and The Edge share vocals with Ed Sheeran and Ukrainian musician-turned-soldier Taras Topolia, whom the band first met while busking in a Kyiv metro station in 2022 at the invitation of President Volodymyr Zelensky. The song takes the form of a letter from a soldier on active duty — equal parts devotion and defiance.
A 4½-minute documentary directed by Ukrainian filmmaker Ilya Mikhaylus will accompany the track on February 24, marking the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Shot in late 2025 while embedded with the 40,000-strong Khartiya Corps, the film centers on soldiers navigating the dissonance of daily life at war.
If Days of Ash feels reminiscent of U2’s earliest activist impulses — the Amnesty and Greenpeace years that drummer Larry Mullen Jr. references — that’s by design. “We’ve never shied away from taking a position,” he notes. Bassist Adam Clayton calls the songs timely; Bono describes them as “impatient.” Celebration, the band promises, will come later.
In keeping with the project’s urgency, U2 have revived their long-dormant fan zine Propaganda for a one-off 52-page issue titled Six Postcards From the Present… Wish We Weren’t Here, featuring interviews, lyrics, and reflections from the band and their collaborators. Four decades after its first DIY-era run, the publication returns as both artifact and argument — proof that, for U2, the conversation between art and activism is far from over. The zine can be read here and listen to the EP in full here.
