U2 are back with their second EP of 2026, Easter Lily. The six-tracker follows last month’s Days of Ash (which was realeased on Ash Wednesday) and features a new collaboration with Brian Eno. Listen to the full EP below.
Where Days of Ash consisted primarily of songs dedicated to activists who died, including Renée Good and Palestinian No Other Land documentary consultant Awdah Hathaleen, Easter Lily tackles more directly personal territory. The EP’s opener, “Song for Hal,” is dedicated to U2’s late friend and producer Hal Willner, who died in 2020 from complications brought on by COVID-19. The title is a nod to Patti Smith’s 1978 album Easter, which Bono said in a press statement gave him “so much hope” when he first heard it at 18.
“With Easter Lily, we ended up asking very personal questions like: Are our own relationships up to these challenging times? How hard do you fight for friendship? Can our faith survive the mangling of meaning that those algorithms love to reward? Is all religion rubbish and still ripping us apart…? Or are there answers to find in its crevices? Are there ceremonies, rituals, dances that we might be missing in our lives?” Bono’s statement continued.
Eno produced the album’s closing track, “COEXIST (I Will Bless The Lord At All Times?),” which the band wrote for the parents of children growing up in war zones. In 2025, all four members of the band—Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen Jr.—shared individual statements condemning Israel’s starvation of the Gaza strip. They noted as a group: “We are not experts in the politics of the region, but we want our audience to know where we each stand.”
Like Days of Ash, Easter Lily arrives alongside another digital edition of the band’s Propaganda zine, which they’ve been publishing since 1986. This issue includes sleeve notes from the Edge, a conversation between Bono and Franciscan friar Richard Rohr, an essay from Clayton on “art and the journey of recovery,” and BTS studio photographs taken by Mullen Jr. It also features song lyrics, a memorial essay on Willner, and more.
Both EPs precede a still-untitled new album from the band, who released their most recent full-length LP, Songs of Surrender, in 2023. The new record is set to come out in late 2026. “We are in the studio, still working towards a noisy, messy, ‘unreasonably colourful’ album to play LIVE…which is where U2 lives,” Bono said. “We still look to vivid rock n roll as an act of resistance against all this awfulness on our small screens. These are for sure ‘wilderness years’ for so many of us looking at the mayhem out there in the world.”
Read about U2’s The Joshua Tree at No. 47 in The 200 Best Albums of the 1980s.
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