As part of the promotion for the upcoming Achtung Baby anniversary release, U2 has been doing a lot of interviews and the subject often turns away from Achtung Baby to U2’s future album plans. In a new and lengthy USA Today article, Edge says the band may start to go through the band’s existing new material before the end of the year. Bono, on the other hand, continues to bang the drum about this being a time of great internal uncertainty:
“We don’t know what we want to do next,” he says. “It feels a bit like 1990, where we have to dig a very deep well. I’m very proud of our last album. It was very rich. I want to go airborne on the next one. But we have to have very good reasons to put out a new U2 album. There are 150 million of them out there. Why would anyone want another one? I don’t know if it will be a year or five years.”
Bono also makes similar comments in the new edition of Q magazine, which has U2 on the cover and that CD of other artists recording Achtung Baby songs.
I don’t know if it’s possible for us to make something current that is meaningful, not just to our audience but to the times we live in. But that’s kind of the job for me and I’m not ready to give it up. I think it’s unlikely that we’ll pull it off, but then so has the last 20 years been unlikely.
Getting songs played on the radio is very important to us. I’m not sure that we’ll ever be number 1 on the pop charts [again], but we need songs that go outside of our audience.
Bono’s comments aside, the general consensus seems to be that U2 will pursue the work already done with Danger Mouse (as they said earlier this year), and not pursue Songs Of Ascent, the set of songs that continued themes found on No Line On The Horizon. Adam tells Q, “We thought there was more material left over from No Line… we now feel a long way from that material.”