Instead, the band has focused on the fact that Trump’s election reoriented their thinking. “Our most well-known and celebrated album is turning 30, so we’re revisiting it,” aren’t words that mix well with the otherwise grand visions incubated behind Bono’s ever-present sunglasses. Of course, the members of U2 could never bring themselves to just come out and say it that way. Long a band obsessed with maintaining relevance and not repeating themselves artistically, it also marks a moment when they just might be accepting their role as elder statesmen. (Were it not for the fact that The Joshua Tree begins with three of U2’s most famous songs, playing it in sequence would be the obvious route here, though it remains unclear whether this will actually be the plan.) Naturally, such a move reeks of nostalgia cash-in, the sort that plenty of classic-rock bands have settled into after years of greatest hits sets, the sort that has prompted a seemingly unending series of younger artists to embark on full-album tours in recent years. Back in January, U2 announced an accompanying stadium tour marking the album’s anniversary, with the band playing the whole thing each night.

But on The Joshua Tree, it worked gloriously, resulting in one of the greatest rock albums of all time. As the years passed, this aim would also hamstring U2, their desire to continue being everything to everybody eventually resulting in vagueness and creative paralysis. It’s the first time U2 truly became U2 as we’d come to understand them - developing the ability to look at faraway places and people and funnel their experiences into panoramic music, stuff that had specificity in its foundation but broadened into universal themes.

They toured, they encountered the America they had heard so much about Bono had made trips to Africa and South America that permanently altered his perspective, as well as his concerns as a person and a musician. But as the ’80s progressed, they saw other landscapes.

They had met up with Brian Eno and dabbled in traditions and textures from across Europe for 1984’s The Unforgettable Fire. had started as post-punks in Dublin, writing about what they could see around them in Ireland. The four men - always the four of them, through the decades, Bono and the Edge and Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen, Jr.

The Joshua Tree was the first time that U2 had truly looked outward, across the world.

U2 the joshua tree