U2 release ‘Street of Dreams,’ the first single from their untitled new album, their first LP of new songs in nine years, due later in 2026
Nine years is a long time to keep the world waiting, even for a band that has spent five decades bending the world to its schedule. On Tuesday, U2 released “Street of Dreams,” the first single from a still-untitled studio album due later this year, their first full-length collection of new songs since 2017’s Songs of Experience. The track arrived alongside a music video shot in Mexico City, directed by Cliqua, and it lands two months before the band marks 50 years since Larry Mullen Jr. pinned a note reading “Drummer seeks musicians to form band” to a school noticeboard at Dublin’s Mount Temple Comprehensive.
Produced by longtime collaborator Jacknife Lee, whose history with the band stretches back to How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and runs through Songs of Experience and Bono’s Stories of Surrender theater tour, the song is vintage U2 in motivational mode. The Edge’s chiming guitar and Mullen’s rolling snare carry a full-throated anthem about refusing to surrender your dreams, and Bono threads a bilingual refrain through the chorus, singing part of the hook in Spanish as a nod to the song’s Mexico City origins.
A Video Born From a Thunderstorm
The clip has a genuine piece of rock and roll folklore baked into it. Filming in May near Plaza Santo Domingo, the band performed atop a school bus covered in graffiti by Mexican artist Chavis Mármol while hundreds of fans crowded the historic center. Then the weather turned. Thunder and rain knocked out a generator mid-shoot, and rather than pack it in, a local family invited all four members into their apartment, where the band continued performing from the balcony.
Crew audio in the video captures the safety concern about lightning before Bono improvises the balcony solution. It is the kind of unscripted moment no production budget can buy. While in Mexico, the band also attended the 2026 Street Child World Cup Finals at Parque Ecológico Lago de Texcoco, tying the visit to the humanitarian throughline that has defined their late-career output.
The Long Road Back to a Proper Album
The years since Songs of Experience have been anything but quiet. U2 launched the Sphere in Las Vegas with their landmark Achtung Baby residency, revisited old material on 2023’s Songs of Surrender, and unearthed the How to Re-Assemble an Atomic Bomb sessions in 2024. This year alone brought two surprise EPs timed to the liturgical calendar, the protest-minded Days of Ash on Ash Wednesday and the reflective Easter Lily in April. The band has been clear that none of those twelve songs will appear on the coming record. “Street of Dreams” is also their first proper single since 2023’s standalone “Atomic City.”
Bono has framed the new record in typically grand terms, telling fans the band is chasing a “noisy, messy, ‘unreasonably colorful’ album” built to be played live, and describing vivid rock and roll as a form of resistance to the bleakness scrolling across everyone’s screens. No title or release date has been announced, though the smart money says September, when the anniversary of that Mount Temple noticeboard note would give the album’s arrival an almost novelistic symmetry.
Whether the record delivers on that promise remains to be seen. But “Street of Dreams” makes the stakes plain. Fifty years in, with nothing left to prove and every legacy box checked, U2 are still swinging for transcendence, still convinced a rock song can talk a stranger off the ledge. That conviction has always been the band’s engine, and on the evidence of this first dispatch, it has not lost any horsepower.
