Songs of Experience album work

In 2016, U2 worked on their next studio album, Songs of Experience , a companion piece to Songs of Innocence . The group had mostly completed the album and planned to release it that year, but after the shift of global politics in a conservative direction, highlighted by the UK’s Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential election , they put the record on hold to reassess its tone. The group spent the extra time rewriting lyrics, rearranging and remixing songs, and pursuing different production styles. Further impacting the lyrical direction of the album was a “brush with mortality” that Bono experienced; in December 2016, he underwent open-heart surgery due to an aortic aneurysm that formed over time as a result of having a bicuspid aortic valve .