U2 is the latest musical act to release a song about Minneapolis and the record surge of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the state.
Renee Good, who was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, is the topic of the opening track on the band’s newly issued six-song EP “Days of Ash.”
In an interview U2 published in an online magazine Wednesday, lead singer Bono said the track, “American Obituary,” is “a song of fury … but more than that a song of grief. Not just for Renee, but for the death of an America that at the very least would have had an inquiry into her killing. … Everyone knows the border has to be managed better, but at what cost … the disfiguring of American justice?”
Set to a musical bed that recalls both the band’s early punk days and the swagger of their “Achtung Baby” era, Bono sings about Good being “born to die free, American mother of three … Renee the domestic terrorist? What you can’t kill can’t die, America will rise.”
“Days of Ash,” which was released on Ash Wednesday, features five other politically charged songs including a track about 16-year-old Sarina Esmailzadeh, one of thousands of Iranian schoolgirls who took to the streets as part of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in 2022 and another written for Awdah Hathaleen, a Palestinian father of three and nonviolent activist who was killed in his village on the West Bank in 2025.
“Going way back to our earliest days, working with Amnesty (International) or Greenpeace, we’ve never shied away from taking a position and sometimes that can get a bit messy, there’s always some sort of blowback, but it’s a big side of who we are and why we still exist,” drummer Larry Mullen Jr. said in a news release.
The band has been working on a new album, their first since 2017’s “Songs of Experience,” but in a news release Bono said these six tracks won’t appear on that record: “These songs were impatient to be out in the world. They are songs of defiance and dismay, of lamentation.”
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U2 follows Bruce Springsteen as a worldwide, massively successful act to issue a protest song about the ICE occupation. The Boss followed up his folk song “Streets of Minneapolis” with a surprise three-song performance at a benefit concert at First Avenue last month. Tuesday, he announced he’s kicking off a 20-city tour at Target Center in Minneapolis that will then hit Portland, Ore., and Los Angeles, two other cities that have endured ICE operations.
There’s no word yet whether U2 will also perform a surprise concert at First Avenue, the downtown Minneapolis venue where they made their local live debut in 1981, when the club was known as Uncle Sam’s.
In 2023 and 2024, U2 performed a residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas. Prior to that, the band’s most recent North American tour was in 2017. That outing included a local stop that September where they drew more than 43,000 fans to U.S. Bank Stadium.
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