It’s a great article and other than The Miracle misstep, the writer identifies the strong material on both albums and ignores the clunkers, except for this perceptive passage:
There’s also a song called “Get Out of Your Own Way,” ironically, which seems to summarize the lingering problem of U2 in this era. Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are both pretty good—and yet they both feel like missed opportunities. Experience in particular seems like an attempt by a band nearly four decades into their career attempting to capture a sound that resonates with youth, but that’s often a losing battle. Yet U2 have pulled off radical and inventive records before, there’s no reason to believe they couldn’t do it again if commercial success and the elusive reward of relevance weren’t chief among their aims.
Yet as U2 are wont to release albums as unofficial trilogies—the post-punk trio of Boy, October and War or the more experimental ’90s trilogy of Achtung Baby, Zooropa and POP—there’s long been a rumored third installment of this series of albums, potentially titled Songs of Ascent. Information about when it might be released or if at all have been spotty, and the album has been a recurring topic on U2 fan forums for a long time. However, Bono did confirm its existence on a podcast interview with Hozier in 2019: “We have this beautiful ecstatic album called Songs of Ascent. I don’t know if we’ll finish it soon or if it will take forever. It’s about the 15 Psalms, named after the 15 steps, from the Women’s Chamber up to the Temple of Jerusalem.” Then again he also said he wanted to do a straightforward rock ‘n’ roll album, so perhaps we’ll eventually hear both.
If there’s hesitancy on U2’s part to deliver Songs of Ascent, I get it: A biblically inspired and so-called “meditative” album probably isn’t the thing that’s going to ensure the crown remains in their hands. But making something different, something interesting and potentially risky, is how they got it in the first place.