U2 played a surprise intimate concert in the underbelly of Tate Modern in London on Tuesday 3 November, a gig recorded for the BBC that reunited the band with longtime collaborator Brian Eno. The show took place in The South Tank, a space beneath the gallery whose backdrop was Eno's artwork 77 Million Paintings, and it served as a launch moment for the band's new album Carnaval De Luz.
The audience mixed celebrities, art students, young creatives and winners of BBC radio contests. Among those attending were Noel Gallagher, Sadiq Khan and Richard Curtis. The room's scale was a deliberate contrast to the band's stadium-sized history, and the setting gave the performance a close, unpolished feel. Many in the crowd were there through BBC radio competitions, a route that placed listeners who had never seen the band up close only metres from the stage.
The setlist combined new material with a selection of older favourites. The new tracks Can't Stop Us Now and The Greatest Show On Earth were played alongside classics including The Unforgettable Fire, Bad, Pride and Beautiful Day. The evening closed with a version of With Or Without You, during which Eno joined the band onstage. Eno's presence tied the performance to the visual world of his backdrop, linking the sound of the band's earlier records to the art surrounding them in the gallery.
The gig follows U2's 50th anniversary concerts in Dublin in September. The recording will be broadcast on BBC Two in late November, with audio available on BBC Radio 2 and BBC Sounds on 30 November. Carnaval De Luz is scheduled for release on Friday 13 November and is the band's first full-length album since Songs of Experience in 2017, a gap of several years that makes the new record a notable return.
The album has roots in a 2006 trip to Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, timed to the city's Carnival. That visit included meetings with Gilberto Gil and Quincy Jones, and The Edge later revisited the experience nearly two decades on. The memory of that trip shapes the record's sense of celebration, and the band's return to the idea gives the new songs a personal thread running back to the early years of the project.
U2 have also announced a world stadium tour for 2027, with London dates planned at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium next summer. The intimate Tate Modern show offered an early look at how the band intends to frame the new material before it reaches larger audiences, moving from a small room of art and radio listeners to the scale of stadium crowds.