Okay, I’m just going to be honest: these aren’t very good songs, are they? Like, I guess I’m happy to have a new U2 album, but, like, this is the band that made Bad. Or even BD/COBL/MOS. And now... this? Like, the songs aren’t awful, but they’re just so many tiers removed from what I know U2 are capable of.
Agree with this & pretty much everything else you've said in this thread.
The U2 that made those songs is gone, and isn't coming back. That band vanished, not suddenly, to be sure, but "slowly stripped away" by degrees, until we're left with what we have now. If it had happened suddenly, we'd have noticed...i.e. if they went from Pop straight to SOI.
So what we're left with now is mostly just excuses and rationalisations, even from the people who love this stuff...
"The lyrics aren't that bad"..."After playing it ten or twenty times it's growing on me a little bit"..."It sounds the same intentionally, because it's a companion to SOI", "The x remix is better"..."It's great if you ignore the rap bit"... etc. etc. etc. I don't want to have to try to convince myself a U2 song is good.
The thing is, they're not even
trying to be the kind of band that made the songs you mentioned. The ambition to be great is gone, replaced merely by the desire to be popular. They stopped trying sometime towards the end of the NLOTH sessions, I think. That's what I meant earlier when I said it seemed like they were regressing as a band. They're simply not the same band w/o Brian & Danny. They're also, frankly, older, so some of this just flat out isn't their fault. The muse doesn't hang around forever, and God has other rooms to walk into.
So yeah, it is hard accept that the band who recorded Bad made these songs, but there it is. As Mikal said, these might be among the last songs we ever get from U2, and we should appreciate the band now, because when they're gone, they're gone.
It's just in many ways that band has been gone for a while anyway....though you can still catch glimpses of them if you manage to catch them on the right night.