U2 have teased the release of their first new album in nine years by dropping a fresh single titled Street of Dreams.
The track's official music video, produced by Jacknife Lee and uploaded to YouTube on July 7, sees the band performing atop a bus in the tight streets of Plaza Santo Domingo, Mexico City, before a sudden thunderstorm causes a generator to crash and forces them to relocate to a local's balcony.
U2's strong Mexican fanbase — which has its roots in the release of the 1987 album The Joshua Tree and the huge stadium shows which followed — play a central role in the video, while Bono plays up to the crowd with Spanish-language lines like: "La calle, calle de los sueños" ("The street, the street of dreams").
Another key element of the new U2 release is the reappearance of Larry Mullen Jr on drums. The band member temporarily left the group in 2023 and spent three and a half years recovering from major neck and back operations before making his return for 'Street of Dreams'. The most-liked comment below the YouTube music video reads: "Great to see Larry behind the kit again".
U2's new album doesn't yet have a release date, but Bono recently confirmed: "We are in the studio, still working towards a noisy, messy, 'unreasonably colour xerox album to play LIVE… which is where U2 lives."
This news came after the release of the six-track EP Days of Ash in February. The project focused on telling the stories of people whose lives were tragically cut short by conflict, from Palestinian dad and No Other Land documentary consultant Awdah Hathaleen to the Iranian schoolgirl Sarina Esmailzadeh.
According to Bono, "These EP tracks couldn’t wait; these songs were impatient to be out in the world. The songs on Days of Ash are very different in mood and theme to the ones we’re going to put on our album later in the year."
