“[Brian] Eno described me as the ‘Mother Teresa of the rough mix’,” The Edge tells Apple Music Radio’s Zane Lowe. “I would not give up. If I felt there was something in this rough mix, I would hold onto it.” So when the U2 guitarist returned to his CDs of demos and rough mixes for this 20th anniversary edition of 2004’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, there was some confidence that he might find a few ideas worth pursuing. However, the making of U2’s 11th album had been protracted and, at times, frustrating. A first round of recording had produced a set of songs that left a feeling of “good but maybe not good enough” hanging over the band in late 2003 until Steve Lillywhite, who produced their first three albums, arrived to urge them towards “Vertigo” and several other big-hook, no-BS anthems that helped make …Atomic Bomb a U2 classic. So, as The Edge rummaged through his archives, expectations would have been a little tempered. When he put the CDs on in his kitchen though, he discovered more than good ideas. There were good songs, complete songs. “It was amazing to go back and hear some of these tracks that we had played as a band so were always kind of fond of—you know, they’re your friends—and to feel that not much more needed to happen to them,” says bassist Adam Clayton. “It was all there.” In fact, there was the material to add 10 unreleased tracks to this anniversary edition. Some have been heard in other forms, live renditions or leaks. Others are completely new to our ears. And they do sound new. Take the glam-disco stomp of “Happiness”, which ripples with the electro experimentation of ’90s albums Zooropa and Pop. “We didn’t change, really, any of the lyrics, we just filled in a couple of missing lines and it feels like it could have been written last week,” says The Edge. “That was one of the songs that got me excited. It felt so prescient, about the here and now. The references are really being made to the military campaign around Desert Storm and what was happening in Iraq. Today, we can apply them to what is happening in Ukraine and Gaza. It’s just bizarre that things have kind of gone full circle.” The strength of these songs is underlined by how little work was needed to be done to them today, but there were always refinements and changes that could be made. “Bono was so complimentary of my singing and so down on his own singing,” The Edge says. “And when we did ‘All Because of You 2’ [a rawer, little more frantic rework of the …Atomic Bomb track], I was like, ‘Bono, this is the absolute best vocal, we’re not having to re-sing this.’ He’s like, ‘No it’s not going to work, you’ll have to double me.’ So I did and that’s the formula that worked. It’s like the combo of the two voices gave him the cover to be singing at the top of his range without feeling self-conscious.” Naturally, many things here betray the back-to-basics ethos that revitalised U2 while making the original album—the grungy, bracing “Picture of You (X+W)” and the heart-swelling choruses and chiming guitars of “Country Mile” and “Luckiest Man in the World”, for instance. “I think we were at a moment where we felt we wanted to go back to the primary colours of rock ’n’ roll: guitar, bass, drums, really simple arrangements, riffs more than very layered orchestral sounds,” says The Edge. If it feels retrogressive to exhume a past where the band were already looking back to their roots, it’s very U2 that they’ve found a way to flip it into inspiration for their future. “It reminds me of a time where rock ’n’ roll was much more vital, it could change your life, you lived for it, it was coursing through the veins,” says Clayton. “If all the world’s a loop, I think we’ve got to the point where we pushed things as far as we can in terms of adding extra things into the band and now we we want to take the layers off and get down to what the band does really well—which is to play live in a room. There’s a freshness to that now and I don’t know if there’s many bands that can still make records that way. It won’t be all that we do—we’ve acquired a few other skills along the way—but it’s certainly something we wanna do on the next record.”