The sixteenth studio album is due on 13 November via Island, with Rosalía among the guests and Silencio streaming now — nine years on from their last full set of new songs.
U2 have filled in details around *Carnaval De Luz*, confirming guests, a firm street date and the story behind a closing duet which is Dolly Parton's final recorded performance. The album is due on 13 November 2026 via Island Records. Lead single *Silencio* is out now, accompanied by a music video directed by Cliqua.
The Dublin band had already put the title into circulation earlier in the week, with *Silencio* flagged as the track to arrive first. What is new is the shape of the record itself: who sings on it, how the last song came together, and where it sits after a long stretch without a full-length collection of original material.
Torn, and a session in June
Album closer *Torn* is a duet between Bono and Parton. Parton recorded her vocal in June 2026, shortly before her death on 25 August 2026 at the age of 80. The track was co-written by U2, Parton and Johnny McDaid of Snow Patrol, with Daniel Lanois adding pedal steel guitar.
Bono said Parton offered the song after turning down an earlier approach for an Irish folk-inspired project. She reworked the lyrics with McDaid and approved the final mix before her death. Producer Jacknife Lee said Parton was proud of the vocal. After she died, the band posted a tribute on Instagram with the message 'Every heart is torn'.
Parton’s appearance is posthumous in release terms, yet the performance itself was finished and signed off in her lifetime. That distinction matters for a catalogue as carefully tended as hers, and it gives the closer a weight the rest of the tracklist will have to answer to.
Guests, themes and nine years
Elsewhere, Rosalía appears on *The Mirror Maker*. The album turns on spirituality, friendship, freedom and endurance — ground that has run through Bono’s writing since the group’s earliest records. Formed in Dublin in 1976, U2 still centre on Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. Their sound began in post-punk and retained an anthemic core built on Bono’s voice and the Edge’s chiming, effects-heavy guitar, with lyrics often edged by spiritual imagery and a mix of the personal and the sociopolitical.
*Carnaval De Luz* is presented as their sixteenth studio album and their first full-length set of new songs since *Songs of Experience* in 2017. The intervening years were not empty. *Songs of Surrender* arrived in 2023, reworking older material; the single *Atomic City* came the same year; live archive releases and the *Stories Of Surrender* work with the Jacknife Lee Ensemble followed; and 2026 saw the *Days Of Ash* EP. None of that replaced a proper studio album of fresh writing. Nine years is a long gap by the standard of a band once known for steady cycles of record and tour.
Jacknife Lee’s presence on the new work links back to that recent surrender-era activity, while Lanois’s pedal steel on *Torn* reaches further into the group’s history of open, atmospheric sessions. McDaid’s co-write ties the closer to a writer whose own band, Snow Patrol, have long sat adjacent to the same broad audience.
*Silencio* is the single in circulation today. No further singles have been named. The November date gives listeners a clear horizon after a week of titles and fragments. What remains is the record — and a final Parton vocal, offered, rewritten, recorded and approved, now set to close a U2 album that has been a long time coming.
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