U2's 'Street of Dreams' is the first new music with Larry Mullen Jr. back behind the kit

U2 put out "Street of Dreams" on July 7, their first new song since the standalone single "Atomic City" in 2023 and the first taste of a studio album that Island says is finished and coming later this year. The album still has no title and no release date. What it does have, for the first time on a U2 record since before the pandemic, is Larry Mullen Jr. playing the drums.

That is the actual news here. Mullen sat out the band's 2023-24 Las Vegas Sphere residency, U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere, while he recovered from neck and back surgery. Bram van den Berg played the shows. Mullen told Rolling Stone he had let it go too long: "I ignored my symptoms over a few years and just pushed through. Turns out, I'm not invincible, and when you don't listen to your body, the consequences are inevitable."

What the song sounds like

Jacknife Lee produced it, which tells you a lot before you press play. Lee co-produced "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" and "Songs of Experience," and he is the guy U2 call when they want the big room and the wide chorus rather than the studio-as-instrument approach Brian Eno brings.

"Street of Dreams" is built for the second half of a stadium set. The Edge is in delay-and-chime mode, Bono works a Spanish hook ("La calle, calle de los suenos") like a call and response he already knows an audience will finish for him, and Mullen plays it straight and heavy, no fills for the sake of fills, holding the middle of the track down. It is unsubtle. It is also the most awake the four of them have sounded on a new recording in a while, which lines up with what Lee has said about the sessions: that the band went back to playing together in one room, and that the record came out of that.

The video, and the storm

The video, shot in early May in Mexico City by the production company Somesuch, is the better argument for the song than the song is for itself. U2 played it three times on the roof of a school bus in Plaza de Santo Domingo, the bus painted by the Mexican artist Chavis Marmol, with an invited crowd in the square. Then the weather turned. A thunderstorm knocked out the generator, and a family living on the plaza invited the band into their apartment so the shoot could finish from their balcony.

Mexico is not a random choice of location. U2's audience there dates to the stadium runs that followed "The Joshua Tree," and the video leans on that history hard, cutting between the band on the bus and a crowd that clearly did not need to be told the words.

What is actually confirmed about the album

Not much, which is the honest answer.

The band has not been silent in the nine years since "Songs of Experience." There were the re-recordings on "Songs of Surrender" and "How to Re-Assemble an Atomic Bomb," and two six-track EPs this year: "Days of Ash" in February, built around people killed in conflict, and "Easter Lily" in April. Bono framed the EPs as separate from the album, and described what they were still chasing in the studio as "a noisy, messy, 'unreasonably colourful' album to play live... which is where U2 lives."

A song called "Silencio" was also performed at Salon Los Angeles during the Mexico City shoot, which suggests at least one more track is close enough to finished to play in front of people.

Nine years is long enough that the release will get treated as a comeback whether or not it earns the word. The drummer being back is a smaller fact and a more interesting one.