Despite the fact that How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb is going to be ten years old next year (!), it is only the second most recent album U2 have released as I write this. On one hand, these big gaps in between albums are understandable. After starting this band as kids, the members are exiting middle age and balancing U2 with other interests. It’s just that if you’re going to go four or five years between albums, they would hopefully be memorable and distinct. Alright, How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb is actually distinct amongst U2’s catalog. As Bono put it, it’s in many ways the truest “rock” album they’ve recorded, featuring more straightforward songs and less production flourishes than their ’90s work. But it doesn’t feel too distinct from any other anthemic pop-rock bands that were recording in the early ’00s. A song like “Miracle Drug” bears all the U2 signatures, but if you put someone else’s voice on the track it would also just sound like some bargain bin group U2 had inspired. That, ultimately, is the quality that sinks How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb (not the faux-rock mugging of “Vertigo”): much of this is U2 sounding like others aping U2, traipsing through a succession of lazy by-the-numbers melodies.

Aside from rock-oriented moments like “Vertigo” and “All Because of You,” a lot of album actually sounds like U2 going full adult-contemporary. The mid-tempo songs largely sound generic (“Crumbs From Your Table”) or entirely throwaway (“Yahweh,” a ridiculously forgettable song from a band that usually closes their albums with very strong, underrated tracks). That being said, there are two songs from How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb that I still turn up whenever I come across them. The first — and I think I’m more or less in the minority on this one — is “Love and Peace or Else.” As inert as so much of the material is here, “Love and Peace or Else” is one of the more unflinchingly rock songs here, but still does something interesting with the arrangement. An adept display of the band playing with dynamics, it features the Edge in an uncharacteristic mode, soaking his guitar in a fuzz not so often heard in U2’s music. It’s one of the few times a sound in a U2 song could be described as “dirty,” and it lends a believable modicum of grit to a song that has some real swagger. The only other thing with a pulse is “City of Blinding Lights,” which is prime ’00s pop-mode U2, and was rightfully the only How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb track aside from the obligatory “Vertigo” to still be in regular rotation when the next tour cycle rolled around. Thanks to some effortless but inevitable pacing, the song grabs you and forces you to follow through all its ebb and flow. When it soars, it feels earned, not like the clumsy wallop of “Here’s the U2 moment!” instructions that dominate the rest of the album.

Aside from those two tracks, if I never heard something from How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb again I wouldn’t know the difference. It’s not offensive, it’s just utterly forgettable. It feels weird to still be annoyed about it almost a decade later, but like Rattle And Hum suffers due to its proximity to The Joshua Tree, How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb suffers due to its proximity to nothing. It has the burden of being one of only three albums U2 has released in thirteen years, and it’s nowhere near accomplished enough to carry that weight. I’ll admit, part of this might be personal annoyance; for relatively younger fans like myself, How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb is one of the only U2 releases we’ve experienced firsthand as music fans in that moment, and it feels like a rip-off when others got War or Zooropa. So maybe a few years down the line it’ll age alright, and sound a bit better. Right now, it’s a thorn, a ten-year-old specter hanging around as I hold out (maybe vain) hope that this bland affair doesn’t go down as one of U2’s last releases.