After topping the U.K. album chart for the first time in more than a decade, U2 has scored a similar victory in the U.S.
The band’s Songs of Surrender has debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 Albums chart, marking the 13th time U2 has landed in the top 10.
The album sold 46,500 units in its first week, earning U2 a return to the chart after a 14-year absence.
The feat also makes U2 the fourth band to score a top 10 album in each decade from the 1980s through the 2020s, Billboard reveals. The other acts are AC/DC, Def Leppard and Metallica.
“Songs of Surrender” includes re-imagined and re-recorded versions of 40 songs spanning U2’s decades-long career.
The band offered more details in a handwritten note mailed out to fans: “The fact is that most of our work was written and recorded when we were a bunch of very young men. Those songs mean something quite different to us now”.
“Music allows you to time travel and so we started to imagine what it would be like to bring these songs back with us to the present day and give them the benefit or otherwise, of a 21st-century re-imagining.” The letter continues, “What started as an experiment quickly became a personal obsession as so many early U2 songs yielded to a new interpretation.”