No Line On the Horizon (Bonus Track Version)

Ask a half-dozen U2 fans about No Line on the Horizon and you’ll get three dozen different opinions—all of them forceful. Released in 2009 after countless delays, the group’s 12th studio album proved to be immediately divisive. Even now, years later, it’s one of the most-debated entries in U2’s decades-spanning catalogue, with listeners still trying to suss out what to make of this late-period oddity: Did the band members push themselves in the wrong direction while making No Line on the Horizon—or did they not push themselves enough? And is the resulting album a respectable near-miss, an overlooked treasure or a full-on artistic flop? One thing’s for sure: No Line on the Horizon had the most painful and protracted gestation period of any U2 album—though not without good reason. The back-to-back successes of 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind and 2004’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb had restored U2’s post-Pop mojo, and yielded several can’t-miss new-millennium rock anthems. But to the band members, the idea of going back into the studio and trying to recreate the magic of something like “Beautiful Day” or “Vertigo” was likely a daunting prospect—not to mention an uninspiring one. After all, this is the group that, years earlier, had abandoned the anthem-packed, arena-filling sound of The Joshua Tree, replacing it with the glittery leisure-suit electro-kitsch of Achtung Baby— to this day, one of the riskiest, and most successful, rock ’n’ roll reversals of all time. For Bono, the Edge, Larry Mullen Jr and Adam Clayton, change was a semi-constant necessity—albeit an uneasy one. Still, no one expected the making of No Line on the Horizon to take almost five years, as the group chased one idea after the next. Because this is U2—a group with the chattiest lead singer of all time—fans spent nearly half a decade getting fitful status reports via the press: At first, the record was going to be a mighty team-up between U2 and super-producer Rick Rubin. When that coll