Twenty years of diminishing returns is a long time to watch a band try to remember who they are. U2 spent that stretch chasing relevance through stadium spectacle, acoustic reimaginings, and pop experiments that felt like boardroom decisions dressed as artistic pivots. None of it worked, and the band seemed to know it — which made everything worse. Carnaval de Luz doesn't fix that history, but it does something more interesting: it stops trying to. The return of Larry Mullen Jr. after medical absence turns out to matter more than it should. There's an argument that U2 were always four people who needed to be in a room together, and the album's physical energy — guitars hitting hard, drums anchoring rather than programming — makes that case better than any interview could. Opener Go (Carnaval de Luz), built on Brian Eno's synths and electronically treated guitars, announces the album's thesis: light as resistance. It's a U2 thesis, obviously, but for the first time in a long while they seem to believe it rather than perform believing it. The strongest songs work because they don't announce themselves as important. Street of Dreams carries Where the Streets Have No Name's guitar architecture without being a tribute act — it goes somewhere the original didn't. La Reina starts in Achtung Baby territory and pivots into a hymnal mantra that earns Bono's David Bowie comparison: 'Nobody is alone, but nobody knows that' lands with the quiet weight of Rock'n'Roll Suicide's coda. If the World Is at War We Better Not Be is the album's emotional center — a song that starts with a 1976 Dublin schoolyard and becomes a reflection on the preciousness of ordinary lives without once feeling mawkish. That's hard to do. Not everything clears that bar. The Mirror Maker's call-and-response tribute to Rosalía is fun and slightly silly and probably exactly what it needs to be. The Silencio punk-rocker works better than it has any right to from men in their 60s with significant property portfolios. The Greatest Show on Earth is the album's most deliberate anthem, Eno's fingerprints all over it, and it will probably become a With or Without You-scale live fixture — which is either a recommendation or a warning depending on your appetite for arena catharsis. The earnest Bono-isms are present ('Don't you give up on your dream') and you either have twenty years of goodwill for them or you don't. The closer, Torn, is the album's most significant moment and also its saddest context. Dolly Parton's final vocal performance — a duet with Bono, Daniel Lanois on pedal steel — delivers the line 'Nothing hurts a mother more / Than a family at war' as a message to a divided world she was leaving. It is, without exaggeration, one of the most affecting things U2 have ever been part of. That it's here, on this record, at this moment, is either lucky or earned — probably both. The structural complaint the review makes is legitimate: the best material from the Days of Ash EP — American Obituary, The Tears of Things, In a Life — appears only on the deluxe edition. If those songs are as strong as described, keeping them off the standard album is a commercial decision masquerading as a curatorial one. The album is very good without them. It would be exceptional with them. That gap matters. The honest summary: this is U2 at something close to their best, not because they've discovered new territory but because they've stopped pretending the old territory doesn't belong to them. The scale is there, the faith is there, the guitars are back, and Mullen's drums sound like a band remembering why they started. For listeners who wrote them off after No Line on the Horizon, this is the evidence to reconsider. For listeners who never left, it's the album they've been waiting twenty years for.
