They’re in the studio recording new material, but U2 aren’t working on a new album just yet. Instead, they’re writing songs for inclusion on an upcoming greatest-hits package that will feature songs released between 1991’s Achtung Baby and 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind.
The album is due out by the end of the year and will be a companion piece to Best of U2: 1980-90, which the band released in 1998. While some pressings of that record included an additional disc of B-sides, this next installment of greatest hits will likely be contained on a single disc, since the band didn’t amass as much material in the past decade as in the one prior, a spokesperson at Interscope Records said.
The new hits LP may also contain the 1995 track “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” from the “Batman Forever” soundtrack; “Miss Sarajevo,” which also came out in ’95, on Passengers: Original Soundtracks 1; and the band’s cover of Mac Gayden and Buzz Cason’s 1967 hit “Everlasting Love,” from 1999’s “Forces of Nature” soundtrack. And if the studio sessions are especially productive, they may yield additional material for the group’s next studio record, the spokesperson said.