On September 25, U2 went back to Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Dublin for a surprise gig, 50 years to the day after they first got together. It was at Mount Temple that Larry Mullen Jr. pinned up the notice looking for musicians that brought the band together in his kitchen. This time, the four of them played “Out Of Control” from Boy and followed it with “Silencio” from Carnaval De Luz. Put those two songs back to back in a schoolyard and you can hear how much of that young band is still in this one.

Carnaval De Luz is U2’s first full-length album of new songs since 2017’s Songs Of Experience. Producer Jacknife Lee, who has worked with the band since How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, gives them room to swing from the dance-floor pulse of “Go (Carnaval De Luz)” to the wide-open guitars of “Street Of Dreams.” Then there’s “The Mirror Maker (Rosalía),” a playful call-and-response tribute to the Catalan singer that turns her name into a chant. Brian Eno is back on synthesizers and shares a writing credit on three songs, including “The Greatest Show On Earth,” where Bono has a little fun with how easily the language of show business and the language of faith can overlap.

The band recorded the album during the same stretch that yielded the Days Of Ash and Easter Lily EPs. Those records arrived on Ash Wednesday and Easter. Carnaval De Luz, which translates to “Carnival of Light,” takes its cue from the celebration that comes before Lent. Even when Bono looks back to that Dublin schoolyard on “If The World Is At War We Better Not Be,” he uses the memory to ask a question that still matters to the four friends who met there. How do you keep faith with one another when everything around you is pulling you apart?

Dolly Parton brings that question home on “Torn,” a country duet she co-wrote with U2 and Snow Patrol’s Johnny McDaid. With Daniel Lanois on pedal steel, Parton and Bono sing about a family whose members barely recognize one another anymore. 

U2 once gave Johnny Cash the last word on Zooropa with “The Wanderer.” More than three decades later, they close another album with a voice that carries a whole world of its own. “Torn” turned out to be Dolly Parton’s final recorded vocal. She spends it singing about how hard it is to love people on both sides of a family quarrel, and how much harder it would be to stop.