U2 Announce New Album ‘Songs of Surrender’, Reimagining 40 of Their Songs

January 12, 2023

U2 have announced a new album, Songs of Surrender, for which they’ve re-recorded 40 tracks from across their back catalogue with new arrangements.

The album is set to arrive on Friday, 17th March, and follows U2 frontman Bono‘s memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, which was released in November 2022. Ahead of the album’s arrival, the band have shared a new version of The Unforgettable Fire cut ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’ along with a trailer that contains a snippet of the re-recorded ‘Beautiful Day’.

U2 – ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’ (Songs of Surrender)

Songs of Surrender (Trailer)

Bono teased the project in his memoir, explaining that working on the book “gave [him] a chance to live inside those songs again.” “It also meant I could deal with something that’s been nagging me for some time,” he said. “The lyrics on a few songs that I’ve always felt were never quite written. They are now. (I think.)”

Select fans have received physical photocopies of a letter written by guitarist The Edge that elaborates on the project. “The fact is that most of our work was written and recorded when we were a bunch of very young men,” The Edge said, per U2 fan page U2Songs. “Those songs mean something quite different to us now. Some have grown with us. Some we have outgrown, but we have not lost sight of what propelled us to write those songs in the first place.”

The Edge continued, expanding on the reinterpretation process: “Intimacy replaced post-punk urgency. New keys, new chords, new tempos and new lyrics arrived… Once we surrendered our reverence for the original version, each song started to open up to a new anthemic voice of this time, of the people we are now, and particularly the singer that Bono has become.”

Letters from the Edge announcing "Songs of Surrender" have started to appear. See the story here: https://t.co/i1xnQuNrxO
(Many thanks to @daniDpVox and @U2360gradi for sharing!) pic.twitter.com/4jyBmJPaT9

— U2Songs.com (@u2songs) January 9, 2023

U2’s last album of original compositions was 2017’s Songs of Experience. That spawned the singles ‘You’re the Best Thing About Me’, ‘Get Out of Your Own Way’ and ‘Love Is Bigger Than Anything in Its Way’. In 2019, the band toured Australia for the first time in nearly a decade.