Carnaval De Luz takes its place in U2's fiftieth year

Silencio is already out and the deluxe editions are listed; the twelve-track set arrives on 13 November 2026, following two EPs released earlier in the year.

U2's sixteenth studio album is six weeks from release, and the shape of Carnaval De Luz is now firm. The twelve-track set arrives on 13 November 2026 through Island and Interscope, produced by Jacknife Lee, with the lead track 'Silencio' already streaming and carrying its own music video. It is the band's first full-length collection of new material in nine years, and it lands in the year that marks half a century since the group formed in Dublin in 1976.

The announcement went out on 24 September. Since then the practical details around the title and the release date have been plain to see: standard CD, vinyl and digital editions, coloured vinyl variants, and limited deluxe vinyl and CD box sets all form part of the release plan.

Loud guitars and a last vocal

The Edge has called Carnaval De Luz a "messy, provocative, sacred collection of songs". Bono has pointed to "loud guitars, deep bass, some ecstatic rhythms". Together those descriptions push against the idea of a polite anniversary piece. The album is being framed as restless and physical, even as it carries the symbolic weight of fifty years.

Jacknife Lee is the producer. He worked on the band's recent short-form work — the 2025 Stories Of Surrender EP carried a credit for the Jacknife Lee Ensemble — and he steers the full studio set. Collaborators include Brian Eno, who began as a synthesiser with Roxy Music, Martin Garrix, Daniel Lanois and Ryan Tedder. The song 'Torn' is a duet with Dolly Parton, noted in the announcement as her final recorded vocal. That credit gives the album a guest list that reaches well outside the rock line-up, and it is one of the details that has travelled furthest since the title was first put out.

From short releases to the full album

Earlier in 2026 the band issued two EPs, Days Of Ash and Easter Lily. Those releases kept new writing in play while the larger album was finished. They followed a stretch in which U2's releases had leaned on reinterpretation and the live archive: Songs of Surrender in 2023 reworked the catalogue for a new reading; 'Atomic City' arrived as a single the same year; a Zoo TV live package from Dublin in 1993 was issued in 2024; the Stories Of Surrender EP followed in 2025. Against that run, Carnaval De Luz is the return to a complete studio album of new songs.

The group still consists of Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. Formed in 1976 and first recorded for a full album with Boy in 1980, they moved through October, War and The Unforgettable Fire in the first half of that decade while building the anthemic quality that has stayed with them — Bono's expressive vocal approach set against the Edge's chiming, effects-based guitar, with lyrics that often carry spiritual imagery and move between personal and sociopolitical ground. Live performance has been as central as the studio. Fifty years on, the new album is offered less as a monument than as another turn of the same restless engine.

What stands now is the wait. 'Silencio' is already out. The remaining tracks, and the deluxe editions once they are in hand, will show what this anniversary year sounds like when the full set lands on 13 November. Until then the band have given listeners a single, a set of descriptions from inside the group, and a guest list that mixes the familiar with the unexpected.