Every U2 Album, Ranked From Worst to Best (Part 1)

The lowdown on the Irish band's studio LPs.

When U2 was announced as the first group to headline the $2.3 billion Sphere venue in Las Vegas, my immediate reaction was, “That makes sense.”

With over 170 million records sold and 22 Grammy wins, here’s a band that has made quite a career of wrapping gritty, earnest rock tropes in increasingly overblown, pop-ready aesthetics. Reports of Sphere concert attendees getting emotional when Bono sang “One” under an LED screen that’s 366 feet tall is an unbeatable example of baking your cake and eating it too.

The U2-Sphere dynamic also plays into the group’s evolving persona, which has been labeled everything from pompous to annoyingly invasive, with more than a little White Savior complex thrown in for good measure. Like every artist who has reached the commercial heights U2 has since Boy hit store shelves in 1980, their pop culture legacy is … complicated.

This brings me to the question that not only birthed this article but this whole ranked discography segment: How many genuinely great albums has U2 released?

Is it three? Five? Zero?

The more I dug into the band’s catalog and asked music nerds I trust the same question, the more I started comparing their studio output to Star Wars movies—no one can agree how many of them are genuinely good.

In this first of three posts centered around U2’s music, I’ll discuss my reactions and findings after listening to every studio album they’ve released.

Before starting, two caveats:

1. As with other lists in this series, I’m only discussing studio releases today. Live albums and compilations weren’t part of the listening exercise (although one kind of falls into the latter category; more on that shortly).

2. A reminder that an album ranked at or near the bottom of this list doesn’t automatically make it awful. The “worse or better” scale is relative to their other studio LPs.

Also, if you haven’t subscribed to this newsletter, I’d love to have you as part of one of the most engaging and welcoming online music communities.

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Away we go:

15. Songs of Surrender (2023)

After an almost three-hour listening experience, my reaction to this one is simple: who is this for?

Critics were decidedly non-plussed by it. It underperformed commercially. At the time of its release, it seemed more of a companion vanity project to help sell Bono’s memoir, a really strange book in its own right. In other words, if you’re going to double-back on your catalog to showcase how strong your songwriting used to be, why package it like this?

Some of those critical reviews I mentioned position this quadruple LP (ugh) as “more than an acoustic greatest hits,” … but that’s precisely what it is, no? It’s not uniformly strong enough to be a reinvention of the source material. It’s more like a soft recontextualization for the AC/AOR audience.

When big arena rockers and intimate ballads get reduced to Starbucks background music, I don’t call that more powerful or enthralling. I call it a shameless bit of legacy management.

14. Songs of Experience (2017)

To clarify, this isn’t the forced iPhone album. We’ll get to that one shortly.

This record is what came after and, musically, it was more of the same, but even less inspired. What’s frustrating is that U2 gives you brief glimpses into how tight they can still sound when they’re all not actively phoning it in. A track like “The Blackout,” featuring a delicious Adam Clayton bassline, is a prime example of maybe two or three songs that fall into the this-isn’t-that-bad category.

But, and this theme will recur throughout this post, the band can record this type of record in their sleep. There’s little on the line for any of them, and when this album shifts into autopilot mode, they sound like they know it, too.

There is no artistic risk and, therefore, no listener reward.

13. Songs of Innocence (2014)

Ah, yes: the iPhone album.

That headline-grabbing faceplant kind of obscured how odd an album rollout this was. It included a presumptive lead single, “Invisible,” that was left off the LP’s tracklist nine months later. The Edge called the digital auto-add on Apple devices a very “punk rock” moment for them, while CEO Tim Cook tried to position it as the “largest album release of all time.”

It was supposed to be this watershed moment turned into a bit of a PR disaster that Bono inadvertently exacerbated when he insisted that, no, the band had been paid for the album and not given it away for free. It sounds like an odd hill to die on morally in the streaming era

Anyway, the music here is whatever. The production from the likes of Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton and Ryan Tedder bring pop-leaning electronic flourishes that, in fits and starts, make for an interesting listen. The closing 15 or so minutes are the best material here, mainly “This Is Where You Can Reach Me Now” and “The Troubles.”

But there’s also a strong sense of unease at work here. It’s as if U2 were unsure whether they should be looking back or forward stylistically. It’s not a calculated reinvention like Achtung Baby (not a dig at that 90s release, by the way), nor is it a full-on nostalgia play.

Instead, it’s about 60% bland and 40% engaging or semi-engaging material. Not awful by any means, but not close to a masterpiece, either.

12. Rattle and Hum (1988)

There’s no other way of describing Rattle and Hum: This album is a mess.

What puts this record ahead of the ones I’ve mentioned already are the studio cuts, which held up better than I expected them to. “Desire” remains among U2’s best singles, while the guitar tone and vocals on “Angel of Harlem” are enjoyable, even if they’re more than a little bit cheesy. That cascading effect in the second half of “All I Want is You” is also an excellent production choice.

But, my goodness gracious, the live performance inclusions range from squarely mid to downright cringe. Bono’s random monologuing, sometimes in the middle of a damn song, is a misguided move that pulls your attention away from the band’s playing and forces it onto his White Savior-ing.

Like, tell me what I’m supposed to do with his aside on opener “Helter Skelter:” “This is a song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles, and now we're stealing it back.”

Released just a year after The Joshua Tree, it’s apparent that the outsized commercial success was already starting to weigh U2 down musically.

11. October (1981)

From the heights of their sparkling debut to … this. Let’s call it a sophomore slump.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a few engaging moments on this record. “Gloria” is a lot of fun, and “I Threw a Brick Through a Window” is one of the more underrated stadium rockers in the group’s arsenal. If anything, it’s clear they were asked to rush another LP out of the studio because of Boy's unexpected success.

As a result, the songs here all feel a little … forced, maybe? Stilted? One-note?

Considering the three records that come right after this one (no spoilers on where they rank), these tracks are mostly forgettable. There’s energy, there’s attitude, but it’s like running on a treadmill—working up a sweat without actually getting anywhere.

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Which of these U2 albums is your favorite? Any ranking you’d rearrange? Sound off in the comments.