Friday, November 13, finally brings Carnaval De Luz, U2’s 16th studio album and first full-length collection of new material since 2017’s Songs of Experience. The more revealing date was already November 3, when a BBC recording in the Tate Modern’s South Tank became a Brian Eno reunion dressed as an album launch, with fans sitting on beanbags.
The one-off, held in the underbelly of the gallery, played to a hand-picked room of Noel Gallagher, Sadiq Khan and Richard Curtis (the kind of guest list only a BBC budget and a 40-year career can summon). The rest of the floor went to art students from five London and Norwich colleges, BBC Music Introducing names and winners of Jo Whiley’s Radio 2 ballot.
The guest list was the tell: not a secret club show so much as a staged historic photograph, taken before anyone has heard the record.
Nine years is a long gap even by this band’s standards, and the risk is a late-career album announced like a product and remembered like a press release. U2’s solution was older, and smarter: put the old architect back in the room.
Eno, the ambient-minded producer who helped shape The Joshua Tree as well as The Unforgettable Fire (and, elsewhere, Talking Heads and Bowie), was in the audience. His own artwork, 77 Million Paintings, wrapped the South Tank in a 360-degree backdrop.
He is not this record’s producer (the band’s own site credits Jacknife Lee), though he co-wrote and played synthesizers on “Go (Carnaval De Luz),” “The Greatest Show On Earth” and “Can’t Stop Us Now.” He is not a guest cameo either.
He is the argument: this is still a band that wants to be heard in the lineage of those records, not only in the glow of the hits.
Jo Whiley introduced the show to a pre-recorded “Zooropa,” and the band opened with “The Unforgettable Fire,” its first airing since 2018.
“Bad” came next, folding in lyrics from the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday” the way it did at Live Aid in 1985 (s/o to Wembley, and to a catalog that still does the heavy lifting).
Only then came the first new one. “Can’t Stop Us Now,” from Carnaval De Luz, was debuted on the night.
“MLK” and “Pride (In the Name of Love)” followed, before “The Greatest Show On Earth,” already released as a single, got its first live performance. Two classics, a new song, two classics, a new song: the running order did the arguing.
Bono told the crowd “what a privilege it was” to play the venue. He also noted that the late artist Louise Bourgeois was the first person to open “this incredible place” in 2000, with a giant spider sculpture.
It is the sort of line a frontman reaches for when he wants the room to feel ordained.
The middle of the set stayed inside that frame: “In a Little While,” then “One.” It was not a stadium inventory so much as a reminder, in a small, strange room, of the records Eno touched and the songs that outlived every format change since.
Then came “COEXIST (I Will Bless The Lord At All Times?),” from the recent Easter Lily EP, which NME describes as Eno-produced: a brief look at the newer work standing next to the monument.
The more revealing gesture came at the end. After “Beautiful Day,” Bono went into the crowd, brought Eno onstage for the closer, “With or Without You,” and led a football chant of Eno’s surname.
That is how you launch an album when the songbook already belongs to everyone in the building. You stand the new work next to the person who helped invent the old atmosphere, and you let longtime fans baptize him.
The television version will do the heavier lifting. NME reports the concert will run on BBC Two and iPlayer on Saturday, November 28, at 9:50 p.m., as part of a U2 night on the channel.
BBC Radio 2 and BBC Sounds follow on Monday, November 30, between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m., with new interviews with the band. After that, both sit on iPlayer and BBC Sounds, and U2 will join Vernon Kay for Radio 2’s Tracks of My Years.
A 2027 stadium tour, titled after “The Greatest Show On Earth,” is already on the books, including dates at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London next summer. (A one-off in a tank is still a warmup for the machine.)
Larry Mullen Jr. is due back, after surgery, for the band’s first full-scale shows since the Las Vegas Sphere residency ended in 2024.
Carnaval De Luz is still, until Friday, a title and two songs edged into a set of standards. The Tate date was not about letting the world hear the album; it was about deciding what the album is allowed to sit beside.
Eno in the crowd, Eno on the walls, Eno chanted back onto the stage: that is the frame U2 wants around the first new record in nine years. The broadcast will confirm the gesture in public.
The test, when November 13 arrives, is whether the songs can live in it, or whether we are left with a beautiful photograph of a producer, taken just before the wait was supposed to end.
