U2 are to release a new album of re-imagined and re-recorded songs in March.
The band will drop 40-song LP ‘Songs of Surrender’, following frontman Bono’s memoir ‘Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story’, which was released in November.
U2 will release the record on March 17th.
They wrote on their official Twitter account: “Songs Of Surrender. 40 Songs. Reimagined and rerecorded. March 17, 2023. #U2SOS40”
It comes after U2’s guitarist The Edge teased a new project in letters to fans, admitting the band are heading in a “new direction”.
He wrote: “When a song becomes well known, it’s always associated with a particular voice. I can’t imagine ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ without the reedy timbre of Bob Dylan or ‘All The Time In The World’ without the unique voice of Louis Armstrong. So what happens when a voice develops and experience and maturity give it additional resonance?
U2 have been around long enough to know what that is like. It’s true for us all, but it’s particularly true for Bono.
“The fact is that most of our work was written and recorded when we were a bunch of very young men. Those songs mean something quite different to us now. Some have grown with us. Some we have outgrown. But we have not lost sight of what propelled us to write those songs in the first place. The essence of those songs is still in us, but how to reconnect with that essence when we have moved on, and grown so much?
“Music allows you to time travel and so we started to imagine what it would be like to bring these songs back with us to the present day and give them the benefit or otherwise, of a 21st century re-imagining. What started as an experiment quickly became a personal obsession as so many early U2 songs yielded to a new interpretation. Intimacy replaced post-punk urgency. New keys. New chords. New tempos and new lyrics arrived. It turns out that great song is kind of indestructible. Once we surrendered our reverence for the original version each song started to open up to a new authentic voice of this time, of the people we are, and particularly the singer Bono has become.
“I hope you like our new direction.”
The track list is yet to be confirmed, but some supporters of the band – who are also made up of Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. – have speculated that it could be the same as the songs in Bono’s memoir, which told the stories of 40 songs from U2’s back catalogue.