2/18/2026

U2 Meet the Moment With ‘Days of Ash’ EP Spotlighting Renée Good Killing, Gaza, Ukraine Wars: ‘These EP Tracks Couldn’t Wait’
The collection, released on Ash Wednesday (Feb. 18) is accompanied by the reboot of U2's 'Propaganda' 'Zine, as well as a short doc for song featuring Ed Sheeran.

By Gil Kaufman

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In a statement, frontman Bono wrote, “The songs on Days of Ash are very different in mood and theme to the ones we’re going to put on our album later in the year. These EP tracks couldn’t wait; these songs were impatient to be out in the world. They are songs of defiance and dismay, of lamentation. Songs of celebration will follow, we’re working on those now… because for all the awfulness we see normalized daily on our small screens, there’s nothing normal about these mad and maddening times and we need to stand up to them before we can go back to having faith in the future.”

The collection kicks of with the pealing sounds of The Edge’s signature guitar chiming on “American Obituary,” an homage to Renée Macklin Good, the 37-year-old mother of three and American citizen killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis in January. “Renée Good born to die free/ American mother of three/ Seven day January/ A bullet for each child, you see,” Bono sings urgently over a track that sounds like it could have appeared on a classic early aughts album such as 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind.

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The band is joined by Ed Sheeran and Ukrainian solider-turned-musician Tara Topolia on the uplifting “Yours Eternally,” inspired by Bono and Edge’s trip to Kyiv in the spring of 2022 to busk in a train station at the invitation of besieged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, where they first met and befriended Topolia. The song is written in the form of a letter written from a active-duty soldier on the frontlines of war.

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The acoustic ballad “The Tears of Things” imagines a conversation between Michelangelo’s David statue and his creator, in which the young man with his sling full of stones pushes back against the notion that he has to “become Goliath to defeat him.” It is followed by the driving “Song of the Future,” which pays tribute to 16-year-old Sarina Esmailzadeh, one of the thousands of Iranian schoolgirls who joined the nationwide 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protest movement, driven to speak out after the death of Jina Mahsa Amini, who died in Tehran in 2022 of injuries suffered following her arrest by the “morality police.”

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