There in the Desert

Is How to Dismantle….. secretly U2’s best album? In our second long read, Ian Ryan says ‘yes’, and thinks you should too

To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb

Hydrogen bombs bring atoms together; atomic bombs break atoms apart. Both can cause death and destruction, but bind two hydrogen atoms with an oxygen atom and it becomes the substance that sustains much of life on earth: water. What defines a desert is the amount of running, life-giving liquid water it contains; yet there are vast amounts of unusable water available in Antarctica but so much dormant life in the Sahara waiting for water to make it bloom as it did this last October.

Deserts and atomic bombs; demon cores and Spheres; water and lack; location and luck; Ireland and Nevada. 2024 has been such a fascinating year for U2 and the clashing, contradictory concepts they like to surround themselves with.

Even when they released “How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb” in 2004, I remember thinking how the term sounded slightly archaic. Atomic bomb. It felt like a relic of the Cold War and the Space Race. But it made sense in the context of U2. That was the term they grew up with. U2 have been part of my formative core for so long at this point that it’s easy for me to forget that my growing up with them doesn’t mean that they grew up with the same references or worlds that I did.

The song ‘Atomic City’ also sounded out-of-place 20 years after Atomic Bomb, like a relic of a past age. I don’t know if it was the drum beat or the style of the chorus or what, but it felt tied to past U2 and past general culture too much. It borrows its chorus from a Blondie song from 1980, almost 45 years old. It makes references to old-school southwestern U.S. concepts like prize fights on the Las Vegas strip, UFOs in Roswell, and even to U2’s own older works: “Come all you stars falling out of the sky;” “Come all you angels forgetting to fly;” “Guitar-shaped pool with strings;” they leave me thinking of ‘The Fly,’ ‘Angels Too Tied To The Ground,’ and ‘Lights Of Home.’

So much of it seemed like a bit of what had become U2’s bane over the past 20 years: navel-gazing, mining the past to create future art. That happens all the time in artists of all types, but it becomes a problem when it’s all about mining one’s own past work for inspiration, rather than the past work of others. In the case of the former, it becomes a bit of an incestuous loop that traps so many rock bands of a certain vintage. They start wandering in a creative desert that was once so verdant and lush.

I Had the Universe Decoded and the Atom Split

I’ve always found it interesting that, for a band that advocated coming together - “there is no them, there is only us” - U2 went with the atomic bomb, the fission bomb, rather than a fusion bomb as their motif. The atomic bomb was the first bomb to be used, the bomb that was most talked about during their formative years, the bomb that had conceptual and cultural heft from before the U2 members were born, created by author H.G. Wells in his 1914 book The World Set Free. Whether by design or by coincidence, U2 chose the weapon of mass destruction that contradicts their words the most. Destruction from separation rather than destruction from combination.

How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb feels to me like the last time U2 were truly free, without the past nipping at their heels and their future possibly drying up. They were riding off the freedom that All That You Can’t Leave Behind and the Elevation tour had bought them. The culture at large had forgiven Pop and PopMart, and the West in particular was greeting them with newly-open arms. Atomic Bomb felt like them taking that well-earned freedom and shifting up a gear. All hits, no skips (‘A Man and A Woman’ is a great song).

The album imagery was striking, intense, and fit well with the guitar rock of the time from The Strokes, Franz Ferdinand, Interpol and The Killers. It was the last U2 album where people were excited for the band’s music videos. The band released the first version of their modern website, getting rid of Propaganda and embracing the digital age. They had the only custom-designed iPod ever from Apple. The first number-single ever on iTunes was ‘Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of,’ and Atomic Bomb was the second album in a row that fans were able to download (illegally) weeks before it actually came out. U2 were in the middle of their third wave, ‘Vertigo’ was all over the TV thanks to Apple advertisements, and people marvelled that a band in their 40s were as vital as they had ever been. They really, really felt free.

They had the universe decoded and the atom split. All because of them.

The Demon Core

The first two atomic bombs dropped on Japan near the end of World War II were nicknamed ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man,’ due to their respective sizes. There was a third bomb being worked on at the time, but it was never finished and was eventually dismantled for its parts to be used on other projects. Due to mishaps with the plutonium core, multiple scientists working on the project died of radiation poisoning, earning it the nickname ‘demon core.’ Fat Man, Little Boy, and Demon Core. Yeesh.

The similarities between the atomic bomb and the Sphere are so evident. Both researched and created in the desert of Nevada, both abominations in a place they shouldn’t exist in, and both things involving wayyyyy too much energy, be it destructive or creative. But both also produced stunning works of human creativity on a scale rarely seen, approaching the most impressive of natural phenomena. Nuclear reactions power the sun, and the Sphere as an individual structure can be seen from space. Both are jaw-droppingly impressive and terrifying at the same time. But the bomb is fission and the Sphere is fusion.

The Sphere brought people together in its demon core at the Las Vegas strip and re-warmed Achtung Baby songs. It was amazing, mind-blowing, and probably the second biggest event I’ll ever be involved in (the U2360 stage was bigger). The graphics were like nothing I’ve ever seen before, and are probably what I’ll judge all future concert graphics against. Even though the Innocence/Experience tour stages weren’t as overwhelming in size as ZooTV or PopMart, U2 still pushed the concept of the concert screen forward by being able to perform inside the screen on an arena-sized scale.

And yet I don’t know how they’re going to top the Sphere’s screen. The sound was unreal, too. On my first night there, I was amazed at how much one of my neighbours sounded like the Edge as the fan sang along to the band, until I realized it was a nearby speaker that was just playing the Edge’s vocals.

Even as U2 rode the crest of a new technology wave in popular music as they had 20 years earlier, it wasn’t the same with the Sphere as with Atomic Bomb. They were doing it as a trio rather than a quartet (I was very grateful for Bram, but it wasn’t the same). They were doing it as much as contractual obligation as artistic statement. They were vitally involved in the visual and audio development of the Sphere’s technology, but it wasn’t THEIRS in a way that other stages they have performed on have been. People largely unfamiliar with U2’s more recent work were astonished by how good Bono still sounds when he sings, rather than expecting him to sound as good as he does as a matter of course.

The Sphere was an astonishing achievement, two decades after their first dalliance with Nevada-based nuclear explosions, but not the same. With Atomic Bomb, it felt like they were able to breathe, artistically and freely. With the Sphere, Bono had to limit his talking outside of the shows due to how the desert air affected his throat. Anything that makes Bono have to shut up can’t be good.

Atomic Tourism

After World War II and at the start of the nuclear arms race, nuclear tourism became a thing. The interstate highway system in the United States was built out during World War II to allow for easier transport of military supplies across the country, and after the war it made it much easier for the average (middle and upper-class) person to travel around the country. Nevada and Las Vegas became new tourist destinations. Las Vegas had boomed during World War II. Military growth took off in the region, and the city grew and adapted to accommodate the dollars of the soldiers stationed nearby. The mining industry, which had always been a part of Nevada’s economy, took off as well. All the new mining industry professionals needed places to spend their money on the weekends. Due to the novelty of the nuclear research and testing, and the nearby travel destination of Las Vegas, Americans started going there not out of necessity but out of desire. A city like Las Vegas should not have existed in a desert like Nevada, yet there it was.

And there it still is. Bono achieved his fusion through U2’s ‘nuclear tourism.’ Fans from all over the world travelled there to spend their money in a place they most likely wouldn’t have been too happy to go to otherwise. Average people, non-U2 fans, also went to see the band at the Sphere as an act of pure tourism, not for U2 themselves. U2 achieved concert-based fusion by bringing all these diverse people together at the Sphere: die-hards and casuals, Americans and foreigners, long-timers and newbies. They were in the desert to re-assemble their atomic bomb.

My Favorite Album

U2’s first official dalliance with Las Vegas was in the ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ music video. Ireland is known as the Emerald Isle, due to the lush green vegetation that grows from all the rain the island gets. It couldn’t be more of a contrast against the brown, expansive fields of sand that populate Nevada. The band has had this weird connection to the desert in their music ever since. U2 are an inherently European and Irish band to me, yet the desert and American destruction prompted them to make my favorite album of theirs ever. Well, tied with the hyper-European Zooropa.

How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb is, for me, U2 at the height of their musical powers. It’s not their most adventurous album, or their most honest album, and it doesn’t have their best lyrics. But for pure song craft, writing and performance, I think it’s better than anything else they’ve done as an album. ‘Original Of The Species’ might be the purest song they’ve ever made, musically. ‘City Of Blinding Lights’ is my favorite song by anyone, ever. The music, the Vertigo tour, the music videos, the use of the culture at the time - it was all U2 at their very best, even with the ticket snafus and Propaganda leaving us. It was such an exciting time to be a U2 fan.

‘Atomic City’ took a while to grow on me. It makes more sense as a product placement song than a proper U2 song. U2 have been doing more product placement songs over the past decade, with tracks like ‘Your Song Saved My Life’ to sell the movie Sing 2 and ‘Ahimsa’ to introduce their playing in India for the first time. ‘Atomic City’ is them marketing themselves to Las Vegas, harvesting components of the city’s past and culture to make themselves appear at home. The whole thing smacks of a radiation-drenched insect movie monster crawling into the city from some experiment gone wrong in the desert. Pure, wonderful nuclear tourism kitsch, but also a relic of the past without much nuance.

A year later, How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb is some of the best music U2 have released since the original album. During the Vertigo tour, a violin played on a backing track at the end of ‘Miracle Drug’ that I thought U2 had only added to the live versions for additional effect. Re-Assemble has shown me that the violin was in the mix the whole time, just far too buried. The vocals in ‘Fast Cars’ are much more nuanced. I hear guitars in ‘City Of Blinding Lights’ I’d never heard before. Parts of ‘Vertigo’ that only showed up in remixes previously are now audible in the album version. It is an absolute improvement.

The new music of Re-Assemble is also stellar, album-worthy stuff. The vocals and layering in ‘Treason’ are sublime. ‘Proof Of Life’ has an urgency and energy that shows just how much The Edge gives to the band. It’s awesome to have a high-quality version of the theme from the ‘The Batman’ cartoon. Needing some ‘Xanax And Wine’ is a bit more raw and honest than needing a ‘Picture Of You,’ but it’s still a sweet song.

And ‘Mercy.’ We finally got a proper ‘Mercy.’ ‘Luckiest Man In The World’ is one of the best songs U2 has ever released. It’s focused in a way the two versions of ‘Mercy’ (the leaked demo and the live version) never were. People complain about its parts being a bit too obviously assembled, but I guarantee that if they had never heard the original version of ‘Mercy’ and weren’t constantly checking ‘Luckiest Man’ against it in their heads, they wouldn’t notice a thing.

“These golden days go by, holding the secrets of the sky,” is Bono simultaneously at his most sincere and snarky. It’s one of the things I love about his poetry, how he can make a line that he both means with all his heart and yet can barely spit out due to its sarcasm. From ‘Mercy,’ we’ve received the demo version, the live version, ‘Luckiest Man’ on Re-Assemble, the hybrid demo version with ‘Little Things,’ and the full song ‘The Little Things That Give You Away’ from Songs Of Experience. What an abundance.

This band, this band. I can think about all their contradictions, what they do that inspires me and what makes me feel cautious, what they do that makes me feel cynical and joyous at the same time, and I love them for it. I’m so happy Atomic Bomb got the big box set treatment, and even though I’ve complained about them, I’m happy we got ‘Atomic City’ and the Sphere.

We’re the luckiest fans in the world, even when we don’t want to be.

©Ryan/U2 and Us, 2025