Pop was U2’s effort to rediscover that sense of journey. A playful, eclectic, typically abrasive synthesis of the band’s conventional songwriting instincts and their big range of latest influences, together with trip-hop, rap, and breakbeat, the album was not a lot a stylistic departure as an try and reveal the breadth of what U2’s model may embody. “The fundamental premise was that they wished to maneuver on, that they couldn’t repeat themselves,” Flood, one in every of its producers, stated of the album. “They wished to usher in components from the dance world and combine them, not essentially with the purpose of turning it right into a danceable album, however to synthesize a brand new sound.” That synthesis may very well be unpredictable, however that was the purpose. “Half the time I didn’t have a clue what was happening,” Howie B, one other producer, has claimed. “So long as you had been capable of react to what was occurring and had been sincere, it was actually thrilling.”
On the ultimate pages of U2: On the Finish of the World, Invoice Flanagan’s e book in regards to the making of Achtung Child, Zooropa, and the ZooTV tour, the creator finds the band again within the studio in London, experimenting with Brian Eno and really slowly easing into writing and recording after a much-needed yr of break following a protracted stretch on the street. “They won’t formally start a brand new U2 album till the spring of 1995,” Flanagan writes, whereas hinting that the work could have already nonetheless begun. That was November of 1994. Pop, their subsequent album, wouldn’t be launched till March 1997. “We have now bother ending issues,” the Edge admitted shortly earlier than Pop debuted, throughout a time of 14- to 16-hour workdays, all-night recording periods, and continually shifting deadlines.
Throughout the 4 earlier years, the band had been engaged on nearly something aside from a studio album. Bono and the Edge had written a James Bond music for Tina Turner (“GoldenEye,” for the film of the identical identify). Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen, Jr., to not be outdone, had composed a brand new model of the Mission: Not possible theme for Brian De Palma’s cinematic reboot of the Sixties TV sequence. The entire band had come collectively to file “Maintain Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me,” for the Batman Endlessly soundtrack, and so they had reunited with Brian Eno to file Unique Soundtracks I, a file of theme music “for imaginary movies,” launched below the identify Passengers. The latter is a number of the most dynamic and rewarding music U2 ever wrote. After all, at the very least one bandmember all however disowned it. “There’s a skinny line between making attention-grabbing music and being self-indulgent,” Mullen stated in 1997. “We crossed that a number of occasions on Passengers.”
