Fans of the legendary rock outfit U2 believe they have found their “darkest” album to date.
Two albums stood out in the search for the “most melancholic” album to date from the band, with the Bono-fronted group releasing fifteen studio albums, as well as a live album and compilations of their best works. Their recent work, Songs of Surrender, was not suggested by fans looking for their darkest material but does mark the most recent U2 album, releasing on March 17, 2023. One user asked: “What’s U2’s darkest or most melancholic album to date? I wonder which U2 album is actually the darkest in terms of overall theme and sound.”
One user replied: “Pop.” Another added: That was my first thought.” Not everyone was impressed with the answer, though, with a third adding: “Pop is the answer to everything on this sub. Exhausting.” Pop, U2’s ninth studio album, introduced a new sound to U2’s discography, with drum machines and sequencing a frequent feature of their hour-long album. But others were adamant that Pop is the correct answer to the question of U2’s darkest project.
One user suggested: “It’s quite something Pop started out being the party album then ended up with If God Will Send His Angels, Gone, Please and Wake Up Dead Man for starters.” Another agreed, adding it was one of the first times fans could hear a “foreshadowing” of what Bono would do after the album.
They wrote: “‘You get to feel so guilty, get so much for so little…’ The line that foreshadowed activist-Bono. Pop, in my opinion, was the crisis of ‘being a rockstar isn’t enough anymore, what else/more can I do?’ His second crisis of faith after October being the previous one.
“It certainly spoke to his character to feel this way, but it tested the band (the other three) to its absolute limits, and the music suffered. Bit of a shame but one for the U2 history books now. To further this thought it almost seems similar to Pink Floyd after The Dark Side of the Moon.
I remember a making of documentary for Wish You Were Here, and David Gilmor mentioned that they should have stopped in a way after The Dark Side of the Moon as they were struggling for themes and had kind of achieved what they wanted as musicians and as a band. Pop is a similar thing in a way. I mean today we can see that Achtung Baby, Zoo and TV were the pinnacle of U2, and that it was a slowly descending slope after that (bar Zooropa).
“Looking back I think it’s fair to say that Pop was a massive crisis of faith within the band. The sullen and sometimes forlorn themes on it reflect that perfectly. The funny thing to me is that all that, to me, sounds like the band had found what they were looking for but there was something missing in the music.
what’s U2‘s darkest/most melancholic album to date?
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“It’s like their hearts are now full so the music is not the sole outlet of their emotional outpourings and ambitions anymore, which was true in real life as Bono found an outlet outside of it.”
While many suggested Pop was the darkest album from the band, another user pointed to Achtung Baby as the band’s darkest album. They wrote: “All comments point to Pop, but I think it’s Achtung Baby. The original poster said theme AND sound. Achtung Baby has a darker, murkier sound than Pop (even down to the differences in their influences at the time, industrial/NIN stuff as opposed to ravy EDM).
“The feelings of loss — be that love or faith — are present all over both. I don’t find Wake Up Dead Man to be ‘darker’ than Love is Blindness in terms of album closers, for instance.”
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