More Snippets from the New Album

">In his January issue, Rolling Stone magazine shows us more of the recording of "No Line on the Horizon".

In the studio as the band wraps the ambitious new 'No Line on the Horizon'

Even from the bottom of the stairway leading up to the control room, the huge sound leaking out is unmistakable: On this early- December evening in London's Olympic Studios, a new U2 song is being born.

Upstairs, on a green couch at the rear of the room, there's Bono, singing his latest attempt at a lead vocal at the top of his lungs. He rocks back and forth on the couch, as if in epileptic prayer, while he chants the lyrics into a handheld microphone. The words, which he keeps revising, have an almost hip-hop-like cadence: "Stand up, 'cause you can't sit down... Stop helping God across the road like a little old lady... Come on, you people, stand up for your love." The track is powered by a heavy riff that lands between the Beatles' "Come Together" and Led Zep's "Heartbreaker"; the groove is slinkier than anything U2 have done in years.

Bono's hair is cropped into a punky buzz cut. He's wearing jeans, worn brown cowboy boots, a black denim shirt — and even in this dim and private setting, his orange-tinted shades. Surrounding him are his bandmates, who have long since finished their parts: the Edge sits next to Bono, eyes closed, absorbing the music; Larry Mullen Jr. plays the occasional air-drum fill nearby; and Adam Clayton stands in a far corner. "We haven't quite gotten this right, and I'm the problem," Bono says of the tune, which is called "Stand Up Comedy" — at least for the moment. Tomorrow it will have new lyrics.

The new album, No Line on the Horizon (due out March 3rd), mixes some of the loudest and fastest tunes U2 have ever recorded with songs that reclaim the experimental spirit of their Achtung Baby-to-Pop Nineties run. There are pop songs, too, as well as at least one familiarly chiming U2 anthem, "Magnificent." But after two years, U2 still aren't quite finished. "We're at the point where half the album is done, and half the album is in a state where anything can happen — and probably will," says the Edge as he offers a tour of the studio's vast live room, which looks much the same as when the Stones recorded "Sympathy for the Devil" there. In the basement, longtime co-producer Brian Eno is revamping various songs with his laptop, while Steve Lillywhite helms the main board upstairs. The band's other producer, Daniel Lanois, left the day before.

The first single is likely to be "Get On Your Boots," a song that picks up where "Vertigo" left off, with a furry monster of a fuzz-guitar riff; power chords that, per Bono, echo the Damned's "New Rose"; verses that share a rhythm with "Subterranean Homesick Blues"; and a chorus that mixes whimsy and ardor: "Get on your boots/Sexy boots/You don't know how beautiful you are." "A hundred fifty beats per minute, three minutes, the fastest song we've ever played," Bono says, playing the tune at deafening volume in an airy studio lounge after dinner. "We're not really ready for adult-contemporary just yet."

The Edge spent time in the past year hanging out and jamming with Jack White and Jimmy Page for the documentary It Might Get Loud, and something seems to have rubbed off: "He's developing a third testicle, that's what is happening to the Edge," Bono theorizes. "I just hope it's not catching." Some of the songs began as solo GarageBand demos by the Edge, but others developed as full-band improvisations (often sparked by moody loops introduced by Eno) during sessions in Dublin, the South of France and Fez, Morocco — with Eno and Lanois playing keyboards and guitar, respectively.

"We start simple, we get complicated, and then we re-simplify it," says Eno, as he tweaks on his computer what he estimates to be the 80th incarnation of a song called "Breathe." "It's been a longer process, but I think it's compositionally stronger than anything they've done for a long time." That said, Eno is irked that the band has dropped some of the more contemplative and sonically adventurous songs it developed. "Tell them they're being stupid cunts," he jokes, after playing a lovely discarded ballad called "Winter."

Still, there are plenty of unexpected sounds. One concept for the album was a division between "daylight" songs — with organic instruments and arrangements — and "after-dark" songs. On the latter, Bono says, "we allow our interest in electronic music, in Can, Neu! and Kraftwerk, to come out." Among those songs is the title track, which has a churning, tribal groove and a deadpan chorus, and the ambitious possible album opener "Tripoli," which violently lurches between different sections. And then there's the astonishing seven-minute "Moment of Surrender," which merges a Joshua Tree-style gospel feel with a hypnotically loping bass line and a syncopated beat.

"Moment" was played just one time — the band improvised the version on the album from thin air. "This kind of spirit blows through every now and then," Bono says. "It's a very strange feeling. We're waiting for God to walk into the room — and God, it turns out, is very unreliable. So you don't have the right to imagine you can make a great album. But what you can do is create the conditions where it might happen."

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