For me, Smee, it isn't a question of drive or will.....I honestly believe they have plenty of those things - they are just badly misdirecting them.
I remember reading a review of SOE that really resonated that said you could tell how hard they have worked at this album, how you could feel how hard they had tried and how much care had gone in.....but then the killer line that summed it up where it said and that is what makes the albums failure all the more galling for them, it is one thing to fail when you have phoned it in, it is quite another to fail when you have tried really hard....
Until u2 wake up from the MOR pop rock daze they are in, until they stop working with jokes like Ryan Tedder, until they stop trying to be relevant - they will continue to fail.
I have found the review i mentioned and this is the part:
"It is tempting to praise Songs of Experience on the basis of its mawkish wholeheartedness.
It does indeed seem like the product of considerable toil: This thing has been in progress for something like three years now, and between its revisions, reconstructions, and post-election rewritings, it plainly benefits from more attention and effort than any U2 album since All That You Can’t Leave Behind.
But it’s precisely this manifest ambition that makes Songs of Experience dispiriting.
The music itself isn’t any better merely because this time around the band actually cares; all the industrious fervor amounts to meager flailing.
It’s one thing to fail when you’re phoning it in: You leave hope that you could pull it off if only you tried. It’s quite another to fail when you’re giving it everything."
Full review:
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/u2-songs-of-experience/