U2 Puts Carnaval de Luz After a Year of Ashes

U2 will release Carnaval de Luz on Nov. 13, a 12-song set Island Records calls the band’s 16th studio album and its first studio album in nine years of new material. The date lands in the same week the four of them marked 50 years since a handwritten notice went up at Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Dublin.

Carnival, in the church year they keep invoking, is supposed to come first. They already spent the fast. Days of Ash arrived on Feb. 18, Easter Lily on April 3, and the feast is the record they are selling now, after Larry Mullen Jr. thought he might never play and after Dolly Parton was gone.

Carnival Comes Before Lent on Paper

Island’s own copy is blunt about the sequence. The two surprise EPs “followed the liturgical calendar, and so Carnaval de Luz sits, stands and dances before them in timeline.” Carnival is the flesh, carne, before Lent’s denial and Easter’s rebirth. On the calendar of 2026, the band ran that year in reverse.

Days of Ash dropped on Ash Wednesday as a six-track burst of protest and lament, five songs plus a setting of Yehuda Amichai’s poem “Wildpeace.” Bono called those tracks impatient, songs of defiance and dismay that could not wait for an album. The Easter Lily EP on Good Friday answered from a quieter room, friendship, loss, hope, renewal, with The Edge taking the first vocal on “Song for Hal,” a nod to the late producer Hal Willner.

THE CHURCH YEAR IN THREE RELEASES

The song Island names as the hinge among the three records is the album closer, “Torn,” a country duet that now has to carry a death the band did not plan when the sessions started. Jacknife Lee, who produced the EPs and the album, has been in the chair with them since How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb in 2004. He said he has not seen a band work this hard, with this much joy, and that the pile of tape is the most they have ever cut in one stretch.

Twenty-Four New Songs in a Single Year

Add the EPs to the LP and Island’s arithmetic is the headline they want on the 50th year: 24 new songs this year. That is not a comeback single with a long wait behind it. It is a working pace they have not shown since they were much younger, and it follows a stretch of re-records, a Sphere residency, and a drummer in recovery.

Songs of Experience, the last studio album of new songs, came out in December 2017. Atomic City was a 2023 single for Las Vegas. Songs of Surrender in 2023 remade the catalogue. How to Re-Assemble an Atomic Bomb in 2024 pulled unused 2004 tracks from the vault. The 2026 EPs were the first batch of newly written material to leave the building, and the band was clear they would not be on the album.

THE 2026 HAUL

• Studio album: Carnaval de Luz is 12 songs, produced by Jacknife Lee, recorded all over the place, including Dublin and Cádiz.
• Ash Wednesday EP: Days of Ash runs six tracks, among them “American Obituary,” “Song of the Future,” and “Yours Eternally” with Ed Sheeran and Ukraine’s Taras Topolia.
• Good Friday EP: Easter Lily runs six more, closing on Brian Eno’s soundscape “COEXIST (I Will Bless the Lord at All Times?).”
• Lee’s verdict: He called the work as good as their best, and said the volume is new even for them.

Bono has described the album as anarchic. The Edge, talking about the opener “Go (Carnaval de Luz),” a Suicide-shadowed lunge, said whatever you thought a new U2 record would sound like, you were not expecting this. Adam Clayton said the bass is louder than on the recent records, and that it will be fun to play live. No tour is attached to the announcement.

The Drummer Who Thought He Was Finished

Mullen sat out U2’s 40-show U2:UV Achtung Baby run at Sphere in Las Vegas from September 2023 to March 2024 while Dutch drummer Bram van den Berg took the kit. Years of elbows, knees, and neck damage had caught up. In the fan magazine Propaganda he was blunt: he had ignored the pain, he is not invincible, and, being honest, he was not sure he would get back to playing at all.

The four of them had not been in a studio room together for a long time. “I couldn’t play. I didn’t think I’d play again,” he said when the album was announced. “So there was a renewed energy when we got into the studio.” He changed how he sits, the height of the kit, and, he said, his intention, a more relaxed attack because he is no longer hurting himself the old way. Bono, in the same period, called him rebuilt.

On Sept. 25 they took that kit back to the Mount Temple yard, about 50 years to the hour of the first kitchen rehearsal, and played for about 1,000 students and staff from a concrete ledge at about 2 p.m. They walked on to Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out.” Bono told the playground, “We’ve escaped from the lab. How’s the experiment working for you?”

THE SCHOOLYARD SET

• Openers: “I Will Follow,” then “Vertigo,” counted off in Spanish, with Bono warning the crowd not to come to him for lessons.
• Middle: “Beautiful Day,” with a lift from Elbow’s “One Day Like This,” then “Out of Control,” from the 1979 U2-3 EP.
• The new one: first live “Silencio,” the day after the studio version landed.
• Close: “One,” with young Music Generation strings the band helps fund, then “With or Without You.”

Later the same day they plugged in on the balcony at Bewley’s Oriental Café on Grafton Street, early songs into “40,” Mullen coming forward at the end to wave. The carnival, for one afternoon, was a schoolyard and a café ledge. Paul McGuinness and Dave Fanning were in the Mount Temple crowd. Bono introduced Mullen as the man who pinned the note, and Clayton as the streaker of the green corridor.

Dolly Parton Left the Closer

Parton died on Aug. 25, 2026, in Nashville at 80, after what her family called a brief battle with cancer. She had recorded her vocal for “Torn” in June. Bono said that when she got ill, she got out of her bed to sing the song, and that you can hear that, and that he cannot even listen to it now.

He had first asked her onto a separate Irish-folk project. She told him the material was a little too Irish, and handed him a song of her own instead. Bono and Snow Patrol’s Johnny McDaid reshaped it toward a mother watching a family come apart. Island calls it a tender country song about broken family ties with a wider resonance. Daniel Lanois plays pedal steel. It is the last recorded vocal performance of her career, and it is track 12.

Roll up, roll up, roll up! Bring your purple socks, your broken hearts, your rose-tinted naivety… oh be amazed in the hall of mirrors. There will be loud guitars, deep bass, some ecstatic rhythms and, yes, some silver tears will make an appearance!

Bono, Carnaval de Luz announcement

He went on, in the same statement, to put monsters just outside the tent. The same imagination that brings the songs can bring the creatures, so they make the drums louder, build a bigger fire, and sweeten the melodies, “because if the world is in darkness we better not be.” That last clause is also a song title in the middle of the record.

Silencio Lasts Two Minutes and 35 Seconds

“Street of Dreams,” the first single from the album, came out on July 7, with a video shot on a graffiti-covered bus in Mexico City, Mullen back in the frame. “Silencio” is the second single, not the second song. It sits at track 7, a two minutes and 35 seconds “homage to early surf-punk insolence,” with extra production from Ryan Tedder.

On the record Bono sings, “There’s a quiet where a baby doesn’t cry / There’s a hush where a mother might sigh / Oh Mary mama angel offer her a choice,” over a rattling kit and a bass line that Clayton will be glad to have loud. The clip, directed by the Mexican-American duo Cliqua (Pasqual Gutiérrez and Raúl “RJ” Sanchez), was shot in a Mexico City dance hall, lyrics thrown on the wall in black and red. It is a short Spanish title in the family of “Vertigo,” another compact punch, not a seven-minute sermon.

The Edge said they worked as hard on this album as on anything they have made, still the same struggle as the first record, and that if it ever got easy the music would sound like that. He also could not resist a guitar-nerd footnote: first use of flat-wound strings on a U2 recording. “Just saying.” He called the set messy, provocative, and sacred.

The Mirror Maker Does Not Feature Rosalía

Track 4 is listed as “The Mirror Maker (Rosalía).” The parenthesis did the work a featured credit usually does, and a lot of first-day posts treated the Spanish star as a guest singer. A band spokesperson later said the song was inspired by her and does not carry her vocal. “Torn” is the one Island marks Feat. The hall of mirrors Bono invited people into starts on the tracklist.

The rest of the guest list is less confusing, and it pulls three decades of U2 helpers into the same carnival tent as a Dutch dance producer.

WHO IS ACTUALLY ON THE RECORD

• Brian Eno: co-writing and synthesizers on “Go (Carnaval de Luz),” “The Greatest Show on Earth,” and “Can’t Stop Us Now.”
• Martin Garrix: co-write on “Glorify.”
• Ryan Tedder: additional production on “Silencio.”
• Daniel Lanois: pedal steel on “Torn.”
• Johnny McDaid and Dolly Parton: co-writers on “Torn,” Parton also the closing voice.
• Rosalía: named in a title, not credited as a singer.

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 (Feat. Dolly Parton).” Island is putting it out in limited deluxe vinyl and CD boxes, coloured vinyl, standard vinyl and CD, and download. No live dates were announced with the record.

A Kitchen Note From 1976 Still Pays Rent

The origin story has not improved with retelling, which is why they keep telling it. In September 1976, 14-year-old Larry Mullen, nudged by his father, pinned “Drummer Seeks Musicians To Form Band” on the Mount Temple board. Auditions were in the kitchen at 60 Rosemount Avenue on Sept. 25. Ivan McCormick’s diary logged it: watched TV, joined a pop group, had a rehearsal, great. Mullen later said it was the Larry Mullen Band for about ten minutes, until Bono walked in.

Fifty years later the same four men put the feast at the end of a year that had already done ashes and lilies, and they played the schoolyard the morning after they named the album. This was the first U2 release of 2026 that arrived with a date printed on it. The EPs had fallen out of the sky at midnight. The LP is on the calendar, which is a different kind of nerve.

New album Carnaval de Luz available 13th November. “Silencio” out now. https://t.co/Fa2Hea7OrT pic.twitter.com/1U42yll9gD

— U2 (@U2) September 24, 2026

FROM THE NOTICEBOARD TO NOV. 13

1. September 25, 1976: Four teenagers meet in Mullen’s kitchen in Artane after the Mount Temple notice.
2. September 2023 to March 2024: Sphere runs 40 shows without him; Bram van den Berg takes the drums.
3. February 18, 2026: Days of Ash lands on Ash Wednesday.
4. April 3, 2026: Easter Lily lands on Good Friday.
5. June 2026: Parton records her vocal for “Torn.”
6. August 25, 2026: Parton dies in Nashville at 80.
7. September 24, 2026: Island announces Carnaval de Luz and releases “Silencio.”
8. September 25, 2026: U2 play Mount Temple and Bewley’s on the 50th anniversary.
9. November 13, 2026: The 12-song album is due.

On the Bewley’s balcony they ended on “40,” the psalm they used to close nights when they were still arguing with the world in real time. Mullen stood alone at the rail and waved. The carnival they are selling is loud guitars and silver tears, and the drummer who posted the note was still there to shut the street down.