Six weeks ago, U2 dropped Days of Ash without warning, a politically charged six-song EP that felt like the band working out its frustrations with the state of the world in real time. Now they’ve done it again. Easter Lily arrived Thursday with zero advance notice, another six songs, another complete pivot in tone.

Where Days of Ash was confrontational, Easter Lily turns inward. This is U2 in a reflective mood, wrestling with faith, friendship, loss, and what it means to hold onto hope when the world is actively trying to talk you out of it. Bono invoked Patti Smith’s Easter from 1978 as an explicit touchstone, which tells you everything about the register he’s operating in here.

The EP opens with “Song for Hal,” a tribute to the late producer Hal Wilner, and it contains one of the more genuinely surprising moments in recent U2 history: the Edge singing lead. He takes the vocal with a plainness that cuts through. It works precisely because it’s unguarded. Bono, who has never been accused of subtlety, stepped aside for something quieter, and the song is better for it.

“In a Life” is an ode to friendship that manages to be emotionally direct without becoming saccharine. The Edge described it as “confrontational to the coolness that creeps into relationships,” which sounds like academic framing for something that is genuinely moving when it lands. “While we accept how absurd it is to talk about faith and friendship in such nihilistic times, we are unrepentant,” he said. Whether that reads as brave or oblivious probably depends on where you’re standing right now.

“Scars” draws from early-eighties post-punk, which means it has more angular energy than the rest of the record, and it’s a better fit for that sonic territory than most of what U2 produced during its actual post-punk phase. The lyrics are about self-acceptance, about owning your mistakes rather than burying them. “Scars are helpful, mistakes are helpful, if they can be owned,” says Edge. That philosophy runs through the whole EP like a low current.

“Resurrection Song” traces back to a decade-old demo that Jackknife Lee originally crafted with the Edge, and the band has since taken it somewhere larger. Larry Mullen Jr.’s drumming is reportedly some of the best he’s recorded, and you can hear the song built around that rhythm as an anchor rather than an afterthought.

The EP finishes with “Easter Parade,” which began as a “retread of older U2 ideas” before Bono and Lee reshaped it into something fresher, though still unmistakably spiritual in its ambitions. It’s a strange closer, not quite resolving the questions the EP raises, but maybe that’s the point. The promise of renewal doesn’t come with a tidy ending.

The honest truth about Easter Lily is that it’s better than it has any right to be for a band this deep into its career, releasing music this quickly, without the safety net of a promotional cycle. U2 is working in a mode that feels genuinely exploratory, and the results are uneven in the way that real exploration tends to be. Not every track here lands, but enough do that the whole enterprise feels vital rather than nostalgic.

They’re apparently still working toward a proper album, described as “noisy, messy, unreasonably colourful.” Whatever that turns out to be, these EPs suggest they’re actually in the right headspace to pull it off.