U2: How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (Re-Assemble Edition)

The Edge rummaged by U2’s archives and located 10 unreleased tracks from 2004’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. The album was a hard-rocking affair produced by Steve Lillywhite, who had supervised the band’s first three albums and jumped in on the final minute to avoid wasting the troubled Dismantle classes. This expanded full version—bristling with 22 remastered tracks—builds on the status of that sonic powerhouse, from the snarling, guitar-driven opener “Vertigo” to the dance-stomp quantity “Happiness,” which presages the experimentalism of Zooropa and Pop. The lyrics to that latter track referenced the U.S. navy’s Desert Storm marketing campaign in Iraq and Kuwait, however they’ve retained relevance in a perennially war-torn world. Previously unreleased songs embrace a hovering assertion of religion (“Country Mile”), a meditation on the common energy of affection (“Luckiest Man within the World”), and a Middle East style of electronica (“Treason”). The first two evoke the back-to-basics ethos of 1983’s War whereas the latter tracks recommend Pop. The Twentieth-anniversary version is offered in an 8-LP super-deluxe collector’s field set, a 5-CD collector’s set, a 2-LP or 2-CD version, a single-CD model of beforehand unreleased tracks, hi-res downloads and streaming codecs, and cassette.