There’s something fitting about U2 choosing Ash Wednesday to drop new music without warning. This time, the offering is a politically charged six-track EP called Days of Ash.

The EP folds in a poem by Yehuda Amichai alongside five new songs, one of which finds features Ed Sheeran and Taras Topolia, the latter reconnecting with the band after that surreal 2022 performance in a Kyiv bomb shelter, when the world felt like it was tilting off its axis in real time. If that moment was symbolic, this EP feels like a continuation.

Over the past year, U2 quietly regrouped to make Days of Ash. These aren’t stadium anthems, they’re songs about people, whose lives were cut short. Minneapolis mother Renée Good. Iranian schoolgirl Sarina Esmailzadeh. Palestinian father and No Other Land documentary consultant Awdah Hathaleen. U2 have always dealt in big themes, but here the lens tightens. Grief isn’t abstract; it has names.

In the press notes, Bono frames these songs as restless, too urgent to sit around waiting for the next full-length. He calls them “songs of defiance and dismay, of lamentation,” promising that more celebratory material will follow on the album slated for later this year.

Alongside the EP, the band are reviving their long-running Propaganda zine, first launched back in 1986. The new issue, U2 – Days of Ash: Six Postcards From The Present… Wish We Weren’t Here, runs 52 pages and includes lyrics, handwritten notes from Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen Jr., plus interviews with Mikhaylus, producer Pyotr Verzilov, and Topolia, who now balances music with life as a soldier. It’s available digitally and in a limited print run.

As for the next full-length album, it will follow 2023’s Songs of Surrender and is penciled in for late 2026. In the meantime, the band haven’t exactly been quiet off-mic. Last year, each member issued statements addressing Israel’s starvation of Gaza, later sharing a joint message acknowledging the horror unfolding and clarifying where they stand — even while admitting they’re not experts in the region’s politics.

Days of Ash Tracklist:

01. American Obituary
02. The Tears of Things
03. Song of the Future
04. Wildpeace – by Yehuda Amichai, read by Adeola, with music by U2 and Jacknife Lee.
05. One Life at a Time
06. Yours Eternally (feat. Ed Sheeran & Taras Topolia)