U2 have announced Songs Of Surrender, a collection of 40 seminal U2 songs from across the band’s catalog, re-recorded and reimagined for 2023 in sessions spanning the last two years.
The project, out via Island Records and Interscope, will be released in full on Friday, March 17. The first track to be made available from this brand new set of recordings is the anthemic “Pride (In The Name Of Love).”
Songs Of Surrender is curated and produced by The Edge and finds the band revisiting some of the most celebrated songs of their 40+ year career, including “With Or Without You,” “One,” “Beautiful Day,” “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” and “Invisible,” for a musical reimagining resulting in a completely new recording of each track, to include the arrangements and, in some cases, new lyrics.
The Edge said of the project: “Music allows you to time travel, and we became curious to find out what it would be like to bring our early songs back with us to the present day and give them the benefit, or otherwise, of a 21st century reimagining.
What started out as an experiment quickly developed into a personal obsession as so many of our songs yielded to a new interpretation. Intimacy replaced post punk urgency. New tempos, new keys, and in some cases new chords and new lyrics arrived. A great song, it turns out is kind of indestructible.
The process of selecting which songs to revisit started with a series of demos. I looked at how a song would hang together if all but the bare essential elements were taken away. The other main aim was to find ways to bring intimacy into the songs, as most of them were originally written with live concert performance in mind.
Reviewing these sketch recordings with producer Bob Ezrin, it was very easy to see the ones that worked straight off the bat and those that needed more work. We all got into the sensibility of less is more.”
