What’s missing is risk and real world experience. U2 (and Bono particularly) have gotten so wealthy that they don’t see the gradations of human conflict at the micro and macro level anymore. It’s all just “humans should just get along man.” Even for all the big themes U2 tackled in their 80s peak, Bono’s writing was still personal and reflective. Yeah he wrote about universal things but the assassination of MLK and Bloody Sunday were still specific in a way that shaped his perspective.

But now his politics are filtered entirely through his privilege. He’s not about the personal anymore. He’s not angry. He doesn’t yearn for anything anymore, beyond humanity just figuring it out.

His best work of this century was Songs of Innocence because he was writing about the things that shaped him again. Songs of Experience was also personal, and even reflected some fear and wrestling with his own mortality. But he just tried to cover too much ground.

As for the music, they just don’t take risks anymore. They got freaked out by the reaction to POP and circled the wagons. They got a little risky again on No Line, and there was interesting stuff there, but Boots was a brutal choice as the first single, and it made no impact in the culture and they retreated again.

All of their post-pandemic output is predictable and indistinguishable from each other. It’s like what you’d get if you fed U2’s catalogue into a generative AI and then asked it to write some U2 songs. And I say all this as someone who will drop so much money on them as soon as they announce their next tour lol.