Bono has said he’s “ready for the future” with U2, as the band has 25 “great” songs for the new album.
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In an interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music, to discuss his new documentary Bono: Stories of Surrender, the U2 frontman discussed how the band is gearing up for what’s ahead and how they’ve made enough new music for their upcoming album.
This comes after hints of new material from the band have been circulating for years, and last month Bono said on Jimmy Kimmel Live that the writing process has involved them overcoming the past to make “the sound of the future”.
At Cannes Film Festival, the frontman confirmed that the band has been recording, “and it sounds like future to me,” he said. “We had to go through some stuff, and we’re at the other end of it.”
Now, opening up to Lowe about the making of a new album, Bono confessed that Edge has made a slew of tracks, with 25 of them being “great”. Now, the band are fine-tuning which ones are good enough to make it onto a project.
“I’ve been in the studio, I’ve heard these men,” he said. “They’re remarkable musicians…Larry has been working late. Edge said there’s 300 songs, and I’m like ‘they’re not songs, Edge’. But he said ‘I have 25 great songs’…I don’t like long albums so we’re going to have to whittle it down to 15.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Bono also discussed Larry Mullen Jr’s medical absence, and his relationships with others in the music scene.
The musician said that Noel Gallagher is “shocked” by how good Oasis are sounding ahead of their comeback tour. “I love them. I just love them,” he said. “And what I really love is, the preciousness that had gotten [into] indie music, they just blew it out. There was just the swagger, and the sound of getting out of the ghetto, not glamorising it.”
“They’re both funny,” he added. “I’m still very close with Noel, and he sent a message to me saying he’s kind of shocked by how great the band is [sounding at rehearsals]. I think we’re going to have a good summer.”
Last month, Bono used his 2025 Ivor Novello Awards acceptance speech to speak out against Hamas, Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli “far-right fundamentalists”.
After U2 became the first Irish act to receive Fellowship Of The Ivors Academy, each member took to the stage to give their own speeches. The last man on the podium was frontman Bono, who used his time to call for peace in the Gaza-Israel conflict. Bono said: “I used to introduce this next song by saying it was not a rebel song. It was because believing in the possibilities of peace was then, and is now, a rebellious act; and some would say a ridiculous one.”
“To believe peace was attainable between your country and ours, between our country and itself was a ridiculous idea because peace creates possibilities in the most intractable situations and lord knows there’s a few of them out there right now,” he said, before adding: “Hamas, release the hostages, stop the war. Israel, be released from Benjamin Netanyahu and the far-right fundamentalists that twist your sacred texts.”
“All of you, protect our aid workers – they are the best of us. God, you must be so tired of us, children of Abraham, in the rubble of our certainties. Children in the rubble of our revenge. God forgive us.”
Earlier this year, Bono shared his thoughts on what is the best way to achieve freedom “in every part of the world where health and humanity are at risk” in op-ed for The Atlantic, which he wrote ahead of receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the US.
In other Bono-related news, he recently hit out at Elon Musk and the US government’s cuts to international aid on Joe Rogan’s podcast. He criticised Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which oversaw the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
“There’s food rotting in boats, in warehouses – 50,000 tons of it,” Bono said. “The people who knew the codes, who were responsible for distributing that aid, were fired. That’s not America, is it?”
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