Forgive the “old man” vibes of today’s newsletter, but I have to point out that U2 released a surprise album this week. U2 is my all-time favorite band, but the color of my fandom has changed over the last twenty or so years.

For the longest time, I have felt that U2 had basically sold out. The fire of being a band of poor rock and rollers vanished in the era of multimillionairedom and private jets. Everything that I liked about U2 just seemed to wither away over the years; they no longer sang about things that I related to, they no longer made music that seemed to be born from their bones. They just seemed to be making music in an eternal quest to be as relevant as they were in the late-eighties/early-nineties; stale, overbaked, and kind of sad. Not that there wasn’t any music of theirs that I liked during that time, but the feeling of relating to their message and the excitement of hearing something meaningful was long gone. They spent too long making music and in their attempt to do something to perfection, they baked all the life out of their music. Everything was much too calculated. Everything was stale. Everything was lifeless.

But this week, they released an EP called Days of Ash. They released it without any warning. There was no press, no build-up; they just released it. And alongside the album, they released a digital version of their fanclub magazine called Propaganda, which they haven’t made since the invention of the internet, really. I loved Propaganda in the 90s. It was a slick, well-designed glossy magazine that came with bonuses for those people who were members. I’ll never forget receiving my copy of their fan-club-only release of Melon way back when. It was an album of remixes of their songs, and though there wasn’t a single good one on the album, it was still mine and it was something that not everybody had, which was spectacular and something that true music fans would strive for…exclusivity. In today’s day and age, nothing is exclusive. It’s just out there for everybody. Time and distance are irrelevant on the internet. Everything is available, all the time.