Just to beat a dead horse while we have a few days of downtime:
Does anyone else still harbor occasional suspicions that this must be the last/next to last U2 record?
I feel like there's a conscious closure to the whole thing, not just the "Experience" theme but the apparent album cover echoing Boy+War and highlighting the next, post-U2 generation (E and B's kids). I also wonder about the following things from the songs we have:
1. The Blackout -- a song people seem to think will come early on in the record, introducing the "dinosaur wonders why it still walks the earth" sort of 'why carry on?' theme and the sense that the meteor is on its way/has already come, i.e. U2 can't be what they once were no matter what they do (I think the political reading is totally there, but I think the self-referential one is also undeniably there)
2. The Best Thing -- "the best thing that ever happened to boy" ties in with that album cover, suggesting a kind of retrospective stance toward U2's whole career, reaching back to the beginning
3. The Little Things -- this one is the most obvious, probably: a sense that "the little things" give away that U2, especially Bono, just can't be what they once were. In this context, the outro serves as a kind of angry, longing-drenched admission that even U2 has to come to an end, hence "sometimes, the end is not coming / it's not coming / the end is here." This would make the outro a kind of callback to "Boy" era, 'Electric Co'-style U2: a return to the start as an ending.
To be clear, I don't think this is the last U2 record. My personal fantasy is that they really have held onto a bunch of "Songs of Ascent" material, and they'll release a ghostly, zero-radio-interest spiritual record after this one, around age 60, "ascending" off stage -- produced by, of course, Eno and Lanois, who are, I think without a doubt, basically members of the version of U2 that means the most.
On a "what would U2 do?" level: I do think it likely they'll announce their last album as their last, so as to get the enormous media/marketing attention said announcement would receive. And I do think they'll want, if at all possible, to go out on their own terms -- that is, to make their last full U2 as U2 album AS a last album, on purpose. Which is part of why I wonder if what we're witnessing -- a revived JT tour and a highly self-conscious, Boy-gesturing album of "experience" -- isn't the beginnings of U2 going out on their own terms.
So, just a time-killing thought experiment. Anyone interested?