U2 announce new album Carnaval de Luz, featuring final recording by Dolly Parton

U2 have officially announced their first album of new material in nearly a decade, entitled Carnaval de Luz, to be released on 13 November.

Closing out the album’s 12 tracks is Torn, the final recorded performance by Dolly Parton, who duets with Bono on a song described in press materials as “a tender country song detailing broken family ties, that holds wider resonances”. Parton died aged 80 on 25 August.

Guitarist the Edge described Carnaval de Luz, U2’s 16th studio album, as “a messy, provocative, sacred collection of songs”, while Bono promised “loud guitars, deep bass, some ecstatic rhythms … the same imagination that brings us our creativity can also bring us monsters. So we make the drums louder. We build a bigger fire. We make our stories wilder and funnier. We make the melodies sweeter and the songs, they better shine, because if the world is in darkness we better not be.”

The album caps an industrious spell for the Irish rock legends, who have already released two EPs this year: Days of Ash and Easter Lily.

Speaking as Days of Ash was released in February, Bono trailed the release of the new album, saying it would have “a carnival vibe … a more defiantly joyful feel” than the vexed political songwriting of that EP, which reflected on ICE, Iran, Ukraine and the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Days of Ash was praised by the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis, who said the “zeal, purpose and belief” of the band’s peak years “has been recaptured here”.

The new album announcement comes 50 years, to the week, after drummer Larry Mullen Jr, then aged 14, pinned a message to the noticeboard of Dublin’s Mount Temple Comprehensive School which read “drummer seeks musicians to form band”.

The quartet, rounded out with bassist Adam Clayton, were all there from the very first meeting, and went on to become arguably the defining rock band of the late 20th century thanks to critically acclaimed and commercially successful albums such as The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby.

They extended their success into the new millennium, with a trio of back to back UK No 1 albums: All That You Can’t Leave Behind, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and No Line on the Horizon. Their most recent albums are a loosely connected trilogy between 2014 and 2023: Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience and Songs of Surrender, the latter a collection of reworked versions of material from their back catalogue.

Carnaval de Luz reunites the band with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, the duo who produced The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby. Eno co-writes and plays synths on three tracks, while Lanois plays pedal steel on the Parton duet. More contemporary names also feature in the form of EDM megastar Martin Garrix, co-writer of Glorify, and pop star and producer Ryan Tedder, co-producer of Silencio.

The latter track, a raucous rock’n’roll song, has been released alongside the album announcement. The first track from the album, Street of Dreams, was released in July.