Bono in Berlin 2018
Photo: Getty Images, Frank Hoensch. All rights reserved.
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Back in 2009, U2 announced Songs of Ascent, a sister album to 2009’s No Line On The Horizon. But then the band put the record on hold and instead released “Songs of Innocence” in 2014. Now “Songs of Ascent” should finally be “almost finished”. That’s what singer Bono said “New York Times”. However, the album is not supposed to be released yet: U2 are planning a “loud rock record” first.
“We’ve almost finished this album called ‘Songs of Ascent,’ but we’re not releasing it,” Bono said. “But I’m telling you, it’s awesome.” For the interviewer, he performed two songs from “Songs of Ascent” entitled “The Bard’s Last Breath” and “Smile.”
Bono stressed that the album is yet to be released: “We didn’t scrap it, we just held it back,” he said. The band wants to take the time to prepare the release. “My phone here is full of new songs,” Bono said. “We were tempted to put them out – out of competition. But we felt the material was so powerful that it deserved time to make sure people hear from them and hear them.”
A “loud, uncompromising, unreasonable guitar album”
Instead, the band now wants to work on a “loud, uncompromising, unreasonable guitar album”. Over the past few albums, U2 have been honing their songwriting skills, Bono said. “Now we need to bring back the firepower of rock ‘n’ roll. I don’t know who’s going to do our fuck-off rock ‘n’ roll album. You almost want someone like AC/DC, you want [den Produzenten] Mutt Lange. the approach. The discipline. The songwriting discipline. That’s what we want.”
Bono will release his memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, on November 1. In it, Bono also comments on the marketing stunt with which U2 put their album “Songs of Innocence” in the music libraries of millions of iTunes users free of charge and without being asked. The last U2 album was released in 2017 with “Songs of Experience”.
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