U2
Easter Lily
★★★★
ISLAND
U2’s second surprise six-track EP of 2026, Easter Lily arrives six weeks after Days Of Ash – the period in the ecclesiastical calendar known as Lent. For U2 fans, it’s a case of feast rather than fast, with both releases standing alone and distinct from the band’s new studio album, for which recording sessions remain ongoing. As The Edge explains in the new accompanying edition of the band’s Propaganda ’zine: “We wrote some songs meant for our album, but they started to assert themselves in some unexpected ways, demanding special attention, their own devotional world, suggesting they didn’t feel part of our album. So we folded… agreed to their timeline… the songs are the boss.”
These are certainly boss songs – Easter Lily feels like the strongest collection of material U2 have mustered in at least 20 years, reuniting the band’s elemental melodic urges and the spiritual fire that somehow got lost amid the vanilla sonic landscapes of last decade’s Songs Of Innocence/Songs Of Experience albums. While the Days Of Ash material landed like news bulletins from the world’s multiple conflict zones – naming names, taking sides – this latest EP is a dispatch from the internal frontline, testing whether ties of faith and friendship will suffice in these dark times. “I feel alone, I need it known,” sings Bono on the lyrical keystone In A Life, “I never achieved anything on my own.”
Musically, this material coalesces around what many would regard as U2’s foundational elements – time and again, The Edge’s signature semaphoric guitar is thrillingly conjoined in perpetual motion with the post-punk era’s least showy yet staunchest rhythm section. Choose your favourite song from any ’80s U2 album, and Scars is that band at its heedless peak and then some, their fraternal bonds immutably gnarled by the years of graft and glory, the happy accidents, the mistakes. As Bono says: “All the tyrants you’ve defeated/The only one that’s left is you.” Opening track Song For Hal is just as good, an elegy for the late producer Hal Wilner – “I watched him disappear from a photograph” – sung with such celestial heart by The Edge that it builds into an anthem for everyone who ever lost a friend.
As with Days Of Ash, this record is testimony to the restored catalytic impact of Larry Mullen Jr., with Resurrection Song a prime example of how his austere belligerence heightens what might otherwise have been a routine slab of U2 positivism. Bono rises to the challenge by pre-emptively taking the piss out of himself: “If I sound ridiculous I’m not done yet.” The song’s synthetic undertow segues into the full-on Vangelis electro-pulses of Easter Parade, which Adam Clayton cheekily augments with a version of the bass line from The Stone Roses’ I Am Resurrection – hey, it’s an Easter song, geddit? While Bono goes the full Catholic Mass with his valedictory chant “Kyrie eleison”, the closing CO-EXIST (I Will Bless The Lord At All Times?) takes the full communion biscuit: co-written with Brian Eno, it features the singer sotto voce skat-rapping, then digitally altered and enhanced into his own one-man choir inveighing against the co-mingling of religion and war. Impossible to argue with the sentiment, the execution will be too much for some to stomach.
So its predecessor was released on Ash Wednesday, and now Easter Lily lands on Good Friday, the day after the Last Supper – in case you weren’t aware, U2 do ‘do God’, and this EP is the soundtrack to their revival. The great unknown for true believers at this moment is how these EPs relate to the imminent main event: are these outliers from a safer path, or will U2’s 15th studio album be cut from a similar exultant cloth. Whatever unfolds, anyone who’s stepped inside this band’s broad church, be it to idle at the back, rest awhile on a pew, or prostrate themselves at the altar, will find renewed reason to believe amid the abundant creative energies laid bare herein. Songs of resurrection indeed – a miracle to behold.
Easter Lily is available to stream now and is accompanied by another special digital e-zine edition of the band’s newly revived fanzine Propaganda.
Easter Lily Tracklisting:
Song for Hal
In a Life
Scars
Resurrection Song
Easter Parade
COEXIST (I Will Bless The Lord At All Times?)
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