Donald Trump Win Caused U2 To Delay Album Release

Irish rock band U2 decided to delay the release of their next album in the wake of Donald Trump’s win.

U2 PUT NEW ALBUM ON HIATUS AFTER TRUMP WIN

The band was just finishing up its fourteenth studio album Songs of Experience when the US presidential “election happened and [suddenly] the world changed,” guitarist The Edge told Rolling Stone. “We just went, ‘Hold on a second – we’ve got to give ourselves a moment to think about this record and about how it relates to what’s going on in the world.'”

As Songs of Experience, a follow-up to 2014’s Songs of Innocence, was put on hiatus, the group decided to celebrate the 30-year anniversary of The Joshua Tree with an international stadium tour. “Another thing started to dawn on us, which is that weirdly enough, things have kind of come full circle if you want. That record was written in the mid-Eighties, during the Reagan-Thatcher era of British and U.S. politics. It was a period when there was a lot of unrest,” he said. “It feels like we’re right back there in a way. I don’t think any of our work has ever come full circle to that extent. It just felt like, ‘Wow, these songs have a new meaning and a new resonance today that they didn’t have three years ago, four years ago.’ And so it was kind of serendipitous, really, just the realization that we needed to put the album on ice for a minute just to really think about it one more time before putting it out, just to make sure that it really was what we wanted to say.”

Their tour kicks off in May and the band will perform their entire iconic 1986 album The Joshua Tree, but will change it up a bit. “This is The Joshua Tree 2017. It’s not The Joshua Tree 1986,” explained The Edge.

The tour will run from May 12 through August 1 and will feature a stop in Tennessee to headline the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival.