U2

Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. came together in Dublin in the 1970s. Boy in 1980 introduced a band with urgent rhythms and a bright, searching guitar sound. War made the music more forceful, with “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “New Year’s Day” giving its political concerns a direct musical shape.

The Unforgettable Fire widened the atmosphere, and The Joshua Tree in 1987 gave the band its largest meeting point between intimacy and scale. “With or Without You” grows through repetition and restraint; “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” carries its uncertainty inside an open, communal chorus. The record’s American landscapes are part of the setting, but the emotional distance in the songs is what makes them travel.

Achtung Baby in 1991 changed the surface dramatically. Recorded in Berlin and Dublin, it brought distorted guitars, electronic rhythm and more fractured characters into the music. “One” sits inside that world as a song whose apparent simplicity becomes less simple with attention. The Zoo TV tour extended the album’s questions about image and communication into a very different kind of rock show.

Zooropa and Pop kept exploring, while All That You Can’t Leave Behind in 2000 returned to a more direct band sound. Hearing those records together is more useful than choosing a single definitive era. U2 can make conviction sound enormous, but some of their strongest music arrives when that conviction is unsettled and the band have to find another way forward.