U2 have released their first collection of new music since 2017, issuing a politically charged EP titled Days of Ash that centers on a series of high-profile global deaths, including the killing of Renee Good by ICE agents.
The six-song release opens with American Obituary, which is about Good, described in accompanying materials as a mother of three who was killed on 7 January while protesting against ICE activity in Minneapolis. On the track, Bono sings: “Renee Good, born to die free / American mother of three / seventh day January / a bullet for each child, as you can see,” before adding: “Renee, the ‘domestic terrorist’? / What you can’t kill can’t die / America will rise against the people of the lie.”
Days of Ash arrives with an extensive interview published in an accompanying fanzine described as a continuation of the Propaganda zines the band began distributing to fans in the 1980s—an approach that places the music inside a larger editorial package of statements, context, and cultural references. In that interview, Bono characterized Good as “a woman committed to nonviolent civil disobedience” and called for an independent inquiry into her death.
An EP built around named events—and the risks of specificity
While political songwriting has long been part of U2’s public identity, Days of Ash is structured around explicit references to identifiable people, institutions, and contested narratives. That level of specificity can carry different consequences in 2026 than in earlier eras of mass-market album cycles—particularly in a distribution environment where songs circulate immediately, globally, and often detached from their full liner-notes framing.
Good’s killing is framed not just as a human tragedy but as a test of US institutional language. In the fanzine interview, Bono said he was “deeply troubled” by Good being dubbed a domestic terrorist by Kristi Noem, identified in the materials as head of the US Department of Homeland Security. “This was an attempt to assassinate meaning itself, the meaning of words, the meaning of truth,” Bono said. “If you let people [get] away with that, you can kiss your democracy goodbye.” In the United States, “domestic terrorism” is a legally freighted term that appears in federal law and shapes how agencies collect intelligence and pursue prosecutions, particularly under the framework of the Homeland Security Act. Deploying that label against an individual protester is, in Bono’s telling, part of what the EP is pushing back against.
In industry terms, Days of Ash functions as more than a release of recordings: it is a tightly packaged set of authored messages, presented alongside curated media and a defined political posture. For a global act operating across radio, streaming platforms, social media, and live touring, that posture can affect everything from audience segmentation to brand partnerships and promotional pathways—even when the band is not explicitly seeking commercial tie-ins for a given project. It also reasserts U2’s longstanding role as an act willing to position itself inside live debates about state power, protest movements and the language used by governments and security agencies.
From Iran’s “Women, Life, Freedom” movement to the West Bank
On Song of the Future, the EP turns to Iran’s Women, Life, Freedom protest movement and names Sarina Esmailzadeh. The materials state she died in September 2022 aged 16 after being beaten by Iranian security forces during the protests, according to an Amnesty International investigation; Iranian officials, the materials add, claimed she killed herself. On the song, Bono sings: “Sarina, Sarina, she’s the song of the future playing in my mind.”
In the accompanying interview, Bono describes Iran’s ruling class as “a priestly class of men whose subjective interpretation of sacred text becomes a club to beat the heads in of anyone who disagrees”. The quote positions the EP as a direct response to current-affairs flashpoints rather than a more generalized protest record, and it does so using language designed to be read as well as heard. By singling out specific cases from Iran’s protest movement, the band foregrounds the tension between citizens’ rights claims and security-state responses rather than treating the region as a distant backdrop.
The track One Life at a Time is described as being about Awdah Hathaleen, a Palestinian activist killed in the West Bank in July 2025 by an Israeli settler. The materials also state that Hathaleen had worked on the Oscar-winning film No Other Land. Bono called the killing “heinous” and said he hoped the song would be “a balm”. Here the band’s focus on a named activist and a specific killing draws the West Bank’s contested legal and security architecture into view without turning the song into a policy brief, connecting the EP’s narrative throughline of individuals caught at the intersection of occupation, settler violence and international humanitarian concern.
A hybrid editorial package: fanzine, book references, and a poem setting
Days of Ash also integrates literary and religious reference points more associated with a curated program than a conventional single-release campaign. One track, The Tears of Things, takes its title from a book by Richard Rohr, described in the materials as applying wisdom from Jewish prophets to address violence and anger today. The song’s lyrics are described as imagining a conversation between Michelangelo’s David and its sculptor.
The EP includes the recitation of an Israeli poet’s work as part of the recording: a poem by Yehuda Amichai titled Wildpeace, read by Nigerian musician Adeola with music from U2.
In the interview, Bono said: “It’s the moral force of Judaism that helped shape western civilisation,” and he celebrated Jewish “mathematicians, scientists, writers, not to mention songwriters”. He added: “As with Islamophobia, antisemitism must be countered every time we witness it. The rape, murder and abduction of Israelis on 7 October was evil, but self-defence is no defence for the sweeping brutality of Netanyahu’s response.”
The same set of statements also acknowledges the lives lost and displaced during conflict in Sudan, and includes criticism of the Trump administration for cutting US foreign aid. Taken together, the framing moves the project away from a single-issue protest record and towards something more like a curated moral and political briefing, with the fanzine acting as a companion essay collection for listeners who want the band’s argument in full.
Ed Sheeran and Taras Topolia feature on the closing track, with a film component dated to 24 February 2026
Ed Sheeran appears on the EP’s closing track, Yours Eternally, as a guest alongside Ukrainian musician turned soldier Taras Topolia, who inspired the song. The materials describe the song as being sung as a letter from a soldier on duty in the conflict with Russia.
According to the accompanying interview, Sheeran initially brokered a meeting between Topolia, Bono and the Edge. The three subsequently played a set in a Kyiv metro station that had been converted into a bomb shelter, in May 2022.
In the same interview, Bono said: “Ask anyone in east Germany or Poland or Latvia if they think Putin will stop at Ukraine if he can get away with it?” He added: “He’d find an excuse to invade Ireland if it suited his purposes.” Bono described Sheeran as a “whirling dervish of a talent” and said Topolia had “this dark sense of humour and defiant spirit that we love about the best rock’n’roll music”.
A short documentary accompanying Yours Eternally, directed by Ukrainian film-maker Ilya Mikhaylus and described as being made while he was embedded with frontline Ukrainian soldiers, is scheduled for release on 24 February 2026, timed to the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion. The film element effectively underlines the EP’s broader claim: that pop songwriting can sit alongside documentary evidence and first-person testimony in shaping how global audiences understand a long-running war.
Positioning: a new-music package after years of reworkings, archives, and standalone singles
The EP’s release clarifies how U2 are separating projects in the current phase of their catalog and touring life cycle: an immediate-response set of songs tied to contemporary events, accompanied by editorial materials, alongside a separate album planned on a different thematic axis.
In recent years, U2 have released one-off new tracks including Atomic City and Your Song Saved My Life. In 2023, they released Songs of Surrender, an album of reworkings of earlier material. In 2024, they released unheard recordings from the sessions for their 2004 album How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. The band have not released an album or EP of new material since the 2017 album Songs of Experience.
For an established act, an EP can function as a lower-lift format that still qualifies as a meaningful new-music moment across streaming services and digital storefronts. It can also support a documentary and a written publication without requiring the longer lead times and concentrated promotional cycles usually associated with studio albums. In this case, the fanzine and film components effectively serve as liner notes for the platform era: context packaged to travel alongside the songs but also capable of being excerpted on their own.
Internal statements: borders, blowback, and performance readiness
Beyond Bono’s comments, the fanzine includes statements from other band members that position Days of Ash as a collective release rather than a frontman-only intervention.
The Edge wrote: “We believe in a world where borders are not erased by force. Where culture, language and memory are not silenced by fear. Where the dignity of a people is not negotiable. This belief isn’t temporary. It isn’t political fashion. It’s the ground we stand on. And we stand there together.” In the context of an EP that moves between Ukraine, the West Bank and Sudan, the passage reads less like a generic mission statement and more like an attempt to codify the band’s view of territorial integrity and cultural rights at a moment when those principles are under active pressure from states and non-state actors alike.
Drummer Larry Mullen Jr, who was absent from U2’s concert residency at the Las Vegas Sphere while recovering from neck surgery, said: “Going way back to our earliest days, working with Amnesty or Greenpeace, we’ve never shied away from taking a position and sometimes that can get a bit messy, there’s always some sort of blowback, but it’s a big side of who we are and why we still exist.”
Mullen also addressed his return to playing after surgery: “Being honest, I wasn’t sure if I’d get back to playing at all so it was a big deal to be back.” He said he had adapted his posture at the kit to enable him to play, and changed his “approach and intention” to the music.
Bassist Adam Clayton contributed cultural recommendations in the zine, including the band Geese and writer Deborah Levy, and emphasized “tolerance, freedom and choosing not to jump to judgment”. Together, the three band members’ statements frame Days of Ash as an agreed-upon intervention in global debates rather than a side-project for the singer alone.
A separate album is confirmed for 2026, and the band frames it as a different project
U2 also confirmed a long-rumoured new album, saying it will arrive later in 2026 and be separate from the EP’s material. Bono said: “The songs on Days of Ash are very different in mood and theme to the ones we’re going to put on our album later in the year.”
“These EP tracks couldn’t wait; these songs were impatient to be out in the world. They are songs of defiance and dismay, of lamentation … because for all the awfulness we see normalised daily on our small screens, there’s nothing normal about these mad and maddening times and we need to stand up to them before we can go back to having faith in the future. And each other.”
Bono added: “Songs of celebration will follow, we’re working on those now,” and said the new album will have “a carnival vibe … a more defiantly joyful feel”.
He also outlined his vision for a “radical centre” in politics and said: “The death of truth is the birth of evil,” adding: “I have confidence the righteous will rise up against this aberration. I have many dear conservative friends who are as worried about the far right as my democratic ones are worried about the far left. Surely the world needs a ‘radical centre’ that draws from both traditions.” The rhetoric mirrors some of the concerns that have filtered into debates about democratic backsliding and information disorder in recent years, but here it is folded into a release strategy: urgent songs now, more celebratory material later.
Despite the project’s explicit political framing, Bono said the band should be cautious about volume and frequency of such messaging: “we have to be sparing with our amplification [of political messaging] … I suggest rationing the bad news as there’s only so much a soul can take”. That tension—between the desire to intervene in public life and the risk of exhausting audiences—is the underlying argument of Days of Ash as much as its subject matter.
The band’s short documentary accompanying Yours Eternally, directed by Ilya Mikhaylus, is scheduled to be released on 24 February 2026.
