U2: the carnival gets loud, Dolly Parton gets the last word
U2 return with their 16th album, a carnival of light that ends with Dolly Parton's last recorded vocal and finds the band trying to sound like outliers again.
BY JOLT Staff · NOV 15 2026 · 4 min readU2's 16th album arrives with a lot of noise around it: first new songs in nine years, two EPs earlier this year, Brian Eno back in the room, and Dolly Parton's final recorded vocal on the last track. Carnaval de Luz is a big record that sometimes trips over its own scale, then closes with a song that makes the mess feel earned.
U2's last album of new original material before this was Songs of Experience in 2017; Songs of Surrender in 2023 reworked older songs. This year they put out two EPs, Days of Ash in February and Easter Lily in April, before the album in November. The project was shaped around a liturgical calendar: the EPs took Ash Wednesday and Lent, the album takes the joyful end. The framing fits, since Carnaval de Luz wants to be a celebration.
“It's her last prayer, in a way, was this song. It feels like a prayer. And I think it's for America. But I think it's for anywhere where there's divided politics.”
The record was produced by Jacknife Lee and released through Island. Work began around the band's 2023 Sphere residency in Las Vegas. Larry Mullen Jr. had surgery and missed those shows; he rejoined in autumn 2024. Brian Eno worked with the band for a week in Enniskerry, Ireland, exploring ideas for a possible second Passengers album. Three of those ideas moved to U2, including 'The Greatest Show on Earth,' which started as 'Cathedral.' Bono said Eno prefers it when U2 stop making sense. The band describe the record as a return to core chemistry: Adam Clayton wanted freeing, joyful music against a period of gloom; Mullen called the group outliers; the Edge came at it as a fan wanting mystery, melody and surprise.
The sound keeps changing. The Edge called the direction sci-fi country, and you can hear why in the pedal steel that Daniel Lanois puts into 'Torn' and in the wavering synths and patient drum hits elsewhere. Some tracks move on a gentle synth pulse; others use spare, echoing drums. The album is chaotic in effect. It wants to be a carnival, so it keeps changing the lighting. The voice is still Bono's, which means the big gestures are still there, but the band sounds more playful than preachy for long stretches.
The record opens with 'Go (Carnaval De Luz),' which carries the title and sets the scale. 'La Reina' follows with a Spanish title, part of the album's turn toward Spanish and Portuguese in its naming. 'Street of Dreams' and 'Silencio' are two of the four singles, and they sit early enough to act as gates into the record. 'The Mirror Maker (Rosalía)' is one of the clearest ideas here: a song written about Rosalía, with a lyric about breaking glass in an emergency. 'The Greatest Show on Earth' carries its own history from the Eno sessions, a finished song grown from 'Cathedral.' Then 'Torn' closes the album as a duet between Bono and Parton. Parton's third verse sits inside the closing track, and it is the moment the album stops being only a U2 record. The chorus repeats that somebody loses either way and every heart is torn. It could be an anti-war song, and the album's themes of family conflict and divided politics make that reading hard to avoid.
This is for listeners who want U2 to act their age without lowering the volume. It sits next to the bigger, stranger end of their catalog, the records where Eno is in the room and Lanois turns up with pedal steel. If you came for the clean, early version of the band, the sprawl will test you. If you want the band that can be ridiculous and still mean it, the record has plenty. The Parton track will pull in people who do not care about U2, and that is fine. It is the kind of song that outlives the album around it.
The flaw is the sprawl. The chaotic streak peaks around 'Superficiality' and 'Can't Stop Us Now,' where the big gestures start to cancel each other out. The middle of the record can feel like a crowd moving without a route. The chaos is more interesting than the polish, though chaos on its own does not carry a record. 'Torn' is so far ahead of the rest that the album has to work to keep up with its own ending. A country version of 'Torn' co-produced by Kent Wells, available to stream but not on the album, is a curious footnote; the album version is the one that matters.
Carnaval de Luz earns a 4.0 because it does the hard thing: it makes a late-career U2 record sound like it has somewhere to go. The EPs set up the calendar, the Eno sessions give it a few strange edges, and Parton gives it a close that will outlast the 2027 tour. The album is uneven, but the best of it is not nostalgic. It is a band using its old tools to make a new room. The last word belongs to Parton, a prayer for a divided table, and that is enough to send the record out on.
