U2 new album update: Bono, The Edge update fans on Songs of Experience

We’re less than a week into 2016 and we already have an update on U2’s next album Songs of Experience. According to the band, it may sound a bit like Zooropa.

Bono and The Edge spoke to Q magazine about the collection, and the frontman compared the newest album to the group’s experimental 1993 collection. The Edge said producer Brian Eno “would love to see us making albums a bit more like [Zooropa]. Where we go, ‘You know what? We’re not going to second-guess any of this. Let’s just go for it.'” He also raved about the Irish rockers’ experience writing on the road. “I think there’s a quality you get when there’s a certain momentum to the process.”,

EW caught up with Bono in October, when he revealed 18 tracks had been recorded, including a “very epic” song titled “Tightrope.” Adds the frontman: “It’s very up. And, you know, that’s probably what the experience has taught us: to be fully in the moment and that fun is respected, and joy is not to be let go of.”

Bono, 55, told Q that his writing on Experience was aided by the time provided by his bicycle accident in November 2014, a blessing in disguise. “The gift of it was that I had time to write while in the mentality that you get to at the end of an album,” he said. “There is a reason why all the great groups made their best albums while in and around touring, because the ideas have to come out of your head.”

WANT MORE EW? Subscribe now to keep up with the latest in movies, television, and music.

U2 hopes to not have a five-year break between records, as they had from How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb to No Line on the Horizon, and between Horizon and Innocence, calling the lengthy respite “inexcusable.” “The only thing that’s worse than it is a shite album,” Bono said in July.

Songs of Experience is expected in 2016.