Trademark flourishes as U2 tick all the right boxes
The recording sessions had, he revealed, yielded a “a lot of hardcore trance”, whilst The Edge’s guitar playing was, said the singer, verging on heavy metal.
Thankfully, the spectre of a U2 LP in the style of the Prodigy hasn’t come to pass. If anything, No Line On The Horizon is the most conventional collection they have put together since the 1980s. Having sloughed off their earnest image on 1991’s Acthung Baby!, only to anxiously re-embrace it a decade later on All That You Can’t Leave Behind, the band has spent much of their recent history in a state of nervous flux — a period from which they have finally emerged with a record that adroitly brings together the best bits from their various incarnations.
