Men on a mission: U2 is back, again. Are they cool this time?

This essay first appeared in the NPR Music newsletter. Sign up for early access to articles like this one, listening recommendations and more.

He may be thanking the stars in the Dublin sky or his political consultants — either way, Bono must be feeling pretty fortunate these days. U2 is back, and not just because they’ve insisted on reentry into the zeitgeist. No major rock band has faced as tumultuous a twilight era as this one, now half a century into its reign as rock’s quintessential try-hards, a status that grew increasingly unmanageable as age and wealth pushed its members farther away from pop’s shifting conversation and toward the dreaded status of nostalgia act. Chasing relevance, U2 made some spectacular mistakes; leaning into its fans’ goodwill, the Irish foursome kept making money while slipping ever farther into irrelevance. Bono, the most extroverted rock star since Mick Jagger, watched his kids replace him in the celebrity pages and tended to his health problems. But the celestial bodies have realigned, and Carnaval De Luz is proving to be the lucky 16th album that’s made U2 admirable again, if not exactly cool.

Despite a few naysayers, this collection of dance tunes and 2 a.m. reflections again justifies U2’s place as a blockbuster band able to startle, engage and generate happiness. It follows two recent EPs that hit like renewal ceremonies and several singles that made clear that the band is here to play, in both the musical and disruptive sense. An engagement with Latin music, signaled by a smattering of Spanish foreshadowed by the album title and Bono’s revelation that one track was named after his latest platonic muse Rosalía, have, on the album itself, thankfully proven to be less like weird appropriation than a reinforcement of the Eurotrashy cosmopolitanism the group first introduced on 1992’s Achtung Baby. (Her reported response, an amused “Do I have to sing on this?” suits the song’s message: They can barely touch the hem of her garment, but will gush anyway.) At times U2 has tried to seize the moment by engaging with awkwardly fitting trends, but here, a core commitment to its own historic innovations feeds an immediacy that feels earned, not forced.

Before the singles showed they’d be back on their old stomping grounds, the Edge had whispered about a “sci-fi Irish folk project,” but beyond an uptick in the guitarist’s pedals-happy noise generation, this music isn’t at all experimental. It does, however, benefit from a certain investment in time travel. Like a self-referential version of Terry Giliam’s Time Bandits, Carnaval De Luz clatters through U2’s history with unapologetic delight. Opening track “Go (Carnaval De Luz)” starts with a wash of noise that points back to Achtung‘s “The Fly.” The slice of Edge’s guitar against Adam Clayton’s bass on “Silencio” calls back to “Two Hearts Beat as One,” from 1983’s War. “The Greatest Show on Earth” is a ballad that harkens back to the band’s Wim Wenders era and “Glorify” sizes down the strut of 2004’s “Vertigo” to fit a more direct invocation of grace. Bono makes the rounds of his various techniques: beat-poet rapping, an unctuous falsetto, a broken croon, that wail. Larry Mullen Jr. shows what expensive physical therapy can do by banging the drums with machine-gun force.

Religious and profane, aggressive and generous, the songs on Carnaval De Luz add new layers to U2’s defining preoccupations: what it means to have a sense of mission in an instant-gratification oriented world, and how hard and good it can be to keep searching for meanings of the word soul.

On that topic, it’s notable that Bono’s lyrics have grown more direct in their outright expressions of Christian faith. He’s still a sucker for a goddess — the unnamed “face of the future” in “La Reina” joins a harem of his divine feminine muses — and an anti-dogmatic believer, as “Torn,” apparently the last song Dolly Parton recorded, makes evident. That particular goddess shared Bono’s stubborn conviction that people are essentially good, especially when enriched by faith, and that loving your neighbor remains possible; their collaboration will move some hearts, but pushes the limits of mawkishness as it laments the loss of the ecumenical ideal.

Faith remains the point of this band, and clearly feels more urgent to Bono now than back in the ’90s, when he first openly indulged in the lemon squeeze of earthly pleasure. We’re closer to heaven now; this is an older man’s album, reflective and repentant. “Street of Dreams” begins with the very Psalm-ish phrases, “God, hear me shout” and in “Glorify” he addresses those who reject the spiritual with the ultimate Jesus flex, snarling, “There’s nothing you can do to keep me from loving you.” Casual fans who are not religious may be uncomfortable with such fervor. Those who don’t mind a little preaching will appreciate the way he continues to play with that tradition, as on “Midnight Sunshine,” a bubblegum soul number that turns on the pantheistic punchline, “You say God no longer cares for us / I say the stars are only there for us to shine.” Banal on the page, Bono’s words gain the light they need from a melody that feels like a mnemonic tool or, yes, a prayer. This is something that he’s said before, a tiny pep talk to stay connected. Dogma breaks things, but the night is illuminated; let’s dance.

U2 tries to maintain that nimbleness throughout Carnaval De Luz, and mostly pulls it off. Doing so, the time bandits meet the moment in which they’ve now landed. Whether dumb luck or Spidey sense had U2 choose a release date right after the U.S. election midterms that have solidified the return of liberal confidence, this music runs on a similar energy. As in many of the campaigns that recently made an impact, humor plays a key role in making U2’s bolder messages palatable. Sometimes it takes the obvious form of wordplay, as when Bono quotes Ernest Hemingway’s famous quip about his favorite cocktails in “Silencio,” but mostly it’s in the music itself. This is where the bass playing of career-long secret weapon Adam Clayton makes a difference. Motown’s bop and the bubbling syncopation of lovers rock inform his style; here those rhythms act as a counterpoint to the drive of Mullen’s drums, and to Bono’s impassioned declarations. Bono knows how to turn a phrase in Clayton’s direction as Edge’s guitar creates static around both, so that his heavier pronouncements fizz a bit and shift their meanings. This playfulness among bandmates is what makes a song like “The Mirror Maker (Rosalía)” not a cringeworthy come-on but a genuine expression of awe at a younger artist. Longtime studio allies Brian Eno and Jacknife Lee make sure the atmosphere’s right for this interplay. Instead of the big skies of the Daniel Lanois era or even the Eno-helmed, overlooked 2009 gem No Line on the Horizon, this album’s production stresses agility and fun.

Even the big ballad “The Greatest Show on Earth,” an homage to the illuminated cathedrals that U2 makes of stadiums when it plays “With or Without You” on its world tours, has enough antic energy running through it to save it from navel-gazing ponderousness. Bono’s take on Peggy Lee singing “Is That All There Is,” with Courvoisier in hand, the song meditates on the many marriages that make up a life. Naming heartache and productive codependence, he may be talking to his actual wife, Ali, who’s been with him as long as he’s gone by that ridiculous name. Regarding a dream that’s gone dusty, he seems caught up with his bandmates, cajoling them into the spotlight one more time. But when he sings “Breathe on me and I’m love and I’m lust,” it’s a force beyond those intimates he welcomes — on the one hand, the spirit that guides him, and on the other, the fans he still insists on making a congregation. Clayton and Mullen turn that spotlight into pinpoints, keeping Bono from settling too firmly into his grandiose gestures, and the Edge offers up the soaring guitar lines that made them work in the first place. This torch song turns into a soul invocation, redolent of Aretha and the Sweet Emotions; all he can do, Bono realizes, is say that little prayer. For himself, for the band, for the moment where we’re stuck and — even if you’re not a fan — for you.