Boy (1980)

Boy (1980)

“Shadows and Tall Trees,” the closing track from U2’s 1980 debut, is named for a chapter from The Lord of the Flies. Everything about that is fitting, from the fact that it’s nabbed from a book about boys stranded on an island and their at times animalistic behavior, to the fact that it’s a novel most often associated with your old high school reading list. Boy is easily the most youthful U2 album, both in demeanor and in theme. It was released when no member was older than twenty, and they’d yet to find their own identity as artists. After a certain point, even when U2 was absorbing contemporary influences, they still sounded inescapably like themselves (this is true of all their ’90s work). With Boy, it was all a bit more unrefined, and they wore their influences a little more obviously. At the time, this included bands like Television and Siouxsie and the Banshees; U2 went as far as to tap Siouxsie’s producer Steve Lillywhite, thus starting a relationship that would continue on and off throughout their career. Beyond that, the album is filled with a young man’s anxieties and frustrations, dominated by nascent observations on identity and sexuality.

To that end, there was the nervy punk energy of uptempo tracks like “I Will Follow,” “Out of Control,” “Stories for Boys,” and “The Electric Co.” These, as well as the rest of Boy, hold up extremely well now, over thirty years on. In fact, though Boy was generally well-received, it probably sounds even better now than when it was released, when U2 were sometimes written off as New Wave also-rans. Part of its staying power is some of the nuance lurking beneath its surface. True to one Boy song’s title, much of the album sounds like and is in fact stories for boys, but there was already the sense that these guys had lived a bit. Bono lost his mother when he was 14, and her death is a recurring theme on Boy, adding weight to the youthful fury throughout. Before spirituality briefly overtook their music with October, Bono was already flirting with mingling sexuality and religion on Boy, a mixture that’d prove more complex when revisited on Achtung Baby. These little tinges colored the edges of Boy, though, hinting at something more tortured lingering behind it all. On occasion, this darkness seeped more directly into the music, as on the standout “An Cat Dubh.”

Even with Boy remaining a worthwhile listen, though, there are some things that keep it from reaching the same levels as later triumphs (though, to be fair, many assert that it is a classic). U2 would go on to change drastically, even within just three or four years from their debut’s release, and there’s some essential part of their nature that hasn’t yet developed here. It sounds like exactly what it is: these guys as kids. It’s cool to see the starting point, and for the songs to be so good, but there isn’t as much to dig back into upon return listens as there is on some of the later U2 releases. I liked Boy a lot more when I was in high school, which might be partially attributable to shifting tastes, but it feels like that’s part of the album’s nature: that it’s one you love, but maybe grow out of eventually, just as the band did.