I can't say it's hit any deeper level for me, or tempted me to rediscover it with some B-sides and a new track listing to find its actually spectacular and a near-classic (that happened to me with ATYCLB). Personally, I don't think this album has that it in it. It's good, not great or grand, and misses in many places it could have hit. Sadly. Nearly every U2 record has had that issue for me since 2005.
To me, SOE is a tale of two aesthetics: the deep, learned U2 who have grist to grind and feel they've learned something to pass along. And the sad, overreaching U2 who accept cheap gimmicks and cameos to find relevance and sound like a karaoke band version of themselves. The album splits squarely in half for me on those lines. LIAWHL, 13, Blackout, TLTTGYA, Red Flag Day, Summer of Love (a little), Landlady, and LIBTAIIW are all in that first camp. The others are campy duds for me. I think they got halfway to making the album they wanted to make, and then went for the universal songs the rest of the way. Sadly, in my opinion.
For me the scariest part is that Bono is on record calling this a major hit, or saying they have their best reviews in years. I feel like late 80s/90s Bono wouldn't have seen it this way, and that the band is now accepting that their ceiling is just lower. It's not the worst they've ever done, but it doesn't even get halfway up to the heights they've reached before.
I go on a lot of band message boards and see people talk about the inevitable "artistic downgrade" or "strive for relevance" for such-and-such artist which, almost without fail, somehow started around the year 2000. Perhaps uncoincidentally, that's around the time forums like these started to take off and we had places to talk about these things 24/7. Or have every single interview on our fingertips where we can overanalyze the quotes or backgrounds of things, as opposed to the old days of reading a Rolling Stone article over and over and posting it on our teenage wall (or whatever floated our boat for the lack of information back then!).
Personally, I don't think the process differs that much from what it did back in the day. You jam and come up with something and if it's not good enough, you work on it some more or ask a producer to chip in during different parts of the process. I think the somewhat longer gestations for albums and people they choose can cause some debate over that (which is fine).
But coming from my own experience in trying to write and record stuff, I've come to sympathize with the process a bit more. You are almost never completely happy with whatever final product you come up with. You re-record things and write new songs to make things fresh for you. You get opinions from other people. And for the most part, you write songs that you want to appeal to people in general.
And it's not really a process where you can just go with whatever the "original" stuff was or keep it as short as possible, especially when you do have a luxury of no deadlines on your hands. I couldn't just sit down and write and record 12 songs in two months and be completely happy with whatever it is. I'll listen to it later on and go "Hmmm, these are good, these are okay and could use improving, and these need to go." Then I'll write some more songs. That's how 99% of musicians work, probably.
In a nutshell, I think most of what they do in the process is still pretty normal. If we read articles by the acts that only show up on our Spotify Discover Weekly playlists or the ones with only 1000 views for their music video on YouTube, there'd be similarities there too. We just don't take the time to read their articles and get some sense of the background (and heck, maybe they're not even big enough to get interviewed in the first place). Plus, if I tried to determine the intentions of every single song ever written, I'd probably lose my mind in the process. There's millions of little things that go into every writing session, or mixing and recording things, and so forth.
In the end, we can try to determine intentions in all the interviews done by a worldwide popular band that we want. But if they really wanted a pop Top 40 relevance, we would have heard the drum machines and hip hop beats on first singles by now. They're a guitar-bass-drums band and always have been. Not an ambient synth collective or whatever one or two songs they've done over the years might say. I'm not accusing anyone of that, but when the karaoke or by the numbers arguments come up, I tend to think that's from most people that really don't play instruments at all (respectfully).
That's not to say we can't have opinions on things either. I know some here weren't crazy about Tedder being a producer, and I even agreed somewhat as his go-to seems to be just working on songs that are E-B-C#m-A in different keys and orders. But yet again, that's also something U2 has done plenty over the years, so maybe it wasn't as far-fetched as it sounded? And what do you know, I ended up liking a few of the things he worked on. Such as it would be for any producer they could choose nowadays.
Overall, I don't think all these older artists had some sort of creative dropoff after 1999, while all the songs before that are somehow about rebuke for the most part. I could overanalyze most things they do or criticize them for how "different" things or people are in their lives now that weren't back then. But yet again, how many of us are the same people we were 25 years ago? How many of us would have our job choices or creative pursuits looked at with a magnifying glass by thousands of people and look somewhat contradictory? Or someone seeing things different for the sole fact that they don't like one result? A lot of us haven't had a camera in our face or a tape recorder recording our every thought over the years either.
Of course, people do talk about other people's lives all the time too. And I think debating what's great and what's not for pop culture stuff is fine too. But in terms of intentions or the process of things for something like writing music, I just can't get too worked up about it these days. And in the Internet age, I can't really lose much sleep thinking how things would be different if this or that happened. It happened! Just like when we're in the right place at the right time for that perfect job offer... or wrecking a car in an accident. We just do the best we can at the time and live with the results. My life is big enough for considerations like that as it is, so I can't really get too mad over the creative decisions that musicians/filmmakers/writers do on their own. I'll take it in, like what I do and dislike what I don't, then move on with things.
Such as it is with this band. At the end of the day, I either like the new songs or I don't. And like other songs, my opinions might shift a bit over time too. After 10+ albums, even if I come out liking most of an album (SOI) or just a few songs really (SOE), either one is really better than the alternative of nothing. I'm glad they're still recording and hopefully they'll continue that for the foreseeable future.