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**U2 - Songs Of Experience**
★★★☆☆

After the sonic sugar rush of 2014's *Songs Of Innocence* – you know, that album Apple forcibly shoved into every iTunes library like a digital door-to-door salesman – U2 return with its companion piece, *Songs Of Experience*. If its predecessor was about looking back through rose-tinted Ray-Bans, this is Bono and the boys squinting into the harsh fluorescent light of middle age, global chaos, and the realisation that being the world's biggest rock band doesn't automatically make you its moral compass.

The Dublin quartet had originally conceived both albums as a double helping back in 2009, but like most U2 projects, it took the scenic route. Between the two records, the world got considerably darker – Trump's ascension, Brexit's convulsions, and various personal tribulations that left Bono questioning everything from his faith to his falsetto. The result is an album that feels like it's wrestling with its own relevance while simultaneously demanding it.

Musically, *Songs Of Experience* finds U2 in their comfort zone – which, depending on your tolerance for stadium-sized emotions, is either reassuring or mildly exhausting. The Edge's guitar work remains a masterclass in atmospheric architecture, building cathedrals of reverb and delay that could house small nations. Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. provide their customary rhythmic bedrock, though one suspects they could probably do this in their sleep by now. Producer Jacknife Lee, along with contributions from Ryan Tedder and others, keeps things contemporary without sacrificing the band's essential U2-ness – that peculiar blend of spiritual yearning and rock star grandiosity that's been their calling card since *The Joshua Tree*.

The album's finest moments arrive when the band stop trying so hard to matter and just let the songs breathe. "You're The Best Thing About Me" might sound like relationship counselling set to a Killers B-side, but it's got an undeniable warmth that recalls their *All That You Can't Leave Behind* renaissance. "Love Is All We Have Left" builds from whispered vulnerability to soaring affirmation with the kind of emotional arc that U2 could probably execute in their sleep – and occasionally sound like they are.

"Get Out Of Your Own Way" serves up some of the album's most direct political commentary, with Bono name-checking Kendrick Lamar and attempting to channel contemporary protest music through U2's distinctly Irish-Catholic lens of guilt and redemption. It's clunky in places but undeniably committed. Meanwhile, "Red Flag Day" finds them in reflective mode, pondering mortality and legacy over one of The Edge's most restrained yet effective guitar performances.

The album's centrepiece, "Lights Of Home," benefits from both a radio-friendly version and a more adventurous remix, suggesting the band are still capable of pushing their sound in interesting directions when they resist the urge to deliver what's expected. "The Showman (Little More Better)" closes proceedings with a surprisingly intimate meditation on performance and authenticity – appropriate for a band that's spent four decades blurring the line between the two.

Yet for all its moments of genuine insight and musical craftsmanship, *Songs Of Experience* can't quite escape the feeling of a band going through very expensive motions. Bono's lyrics occasionally tip from earnest into self-parody, and the album's 40-minute runtime feels both overstuffed and strangely slight. There's a sense that U2 are still the best in the world at being U2, but whether the world needs more U2 remains an open question.

Five years on, *Songs Of Experience* occupies a curious space in the U2 catalogue. It's neither the disaster some predicted nor the masterpiece the band clearly hoped for. Instead, it stands as a competent, occasionally inspired document of a legendary band grappling with their place in an increasingly fragmented world. For the faithful, it offers enough moments of transcendence to justify the pilgrimage. For everyone else, it's a reminder that sometimes experience isn't quite as valuable as innocence – even when it's delivered with stadium-sized conviction and The Edge's trademark chiming guitars.

In the end, *Songs Of Experience* is U2 at their most human – which, paradoxically, might be exactly what makes it feel slightly less than essential.