U2 new album, ‘Songs of Surrender,’ dropping March 17

U2 is set to release a new album of old material. The Irish rockers just announced they’re dropping Songs Of Surrender, featuring “40 Songs. Reimagined and rerecorded,” on March 17, just in time for St. Patrick’s Day.

The album appears to be inspired by Bono’s recently released biography, Surrender: 40 Songs; One Story. Based on the clip of “Beautiful Day” they shared with the announcement, it will feature reworked versions of U2 classics.

U2 fans began getting hints of the new project earlier this week, with folks on Twitter sharing pictures of a handwritten note from Edge they received in the mail.

“So what happens when a voice develops and experience and maturity give it additional resonance?” he writes. “U2 have been around long enough to know what that is like. It’s true for us all, but it’s particularly true for Bono,” adding that since the band wrote many of the songs as “very young men,” they “mean something quite different to us now.”

He shares, “Music allows you to time travel and so we started to imagine what it would be like to bring these songs back with us to the present day and give them the benefit or otherwise, of a 21st century re-imagining. What started as an experiment quickly became a personal obsession as so many early U2 songs yielded to a new interpretation.”

Finally, he writes, “Once we surrendered our reverence for the original version each song started to open up to a new authentic voice of this time, of the people we are, and particularly the singer Bono has become.”