I already wrote something like 3,000 words on Zooropa for its 20th anniversary back in July, but some days it’s my favorite U2 album, so, as it turns out, I actually have more thoughts on it. The interesting thing about when U2 eventually got around to experimenting with dance music and electronic flourishes is that they used it to write their darkest music, and to cloak perhaps their deepest, most personal songs in a supposedly shiny veneer. When ebullient but nostalgia-laced ’80s synth-pop was in its heyday they had no interest, ditto apparently for rave music’s effervescence. Instead, their electronic music has always been about the comedown and the hangover.

In reality, Zooropa sustains its experimentation much more than Pop, possessing fewer traditional U2 moments than its follow-up. It’s easily the strangest release actually put out under the U2 moniker (Passengers obviously surpasses it). But while the songs vary in nature from one to the next, they all contribute to one cohesive aura. Zooropa is the band in a loopy headspace, reeling from celebrity culture and technology, but also pushed to a limit where all their dance music is about the night out turning bad. The image of a car crash shows up twice, three times if you want to intuit there’d be a burning car on the side of the highway at some point in the apocalyptic Americana of “The Wanderer.” First, it’s in “Stay (Faraway, So Close!)” (“Dressed up like a car crash/ Your wheels are turning but you’re upside down”) and then, of course, in “Daddy’s Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car.” The former is one of the more standard U2 songs on Zooropa, but it’s sandwiched between the shimmering disco of “Lemon” and the claustrophobic loops of “Daddy’s Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car.” It’s also references domestic abuse, but there’s a way to hear that song and picture Bono (or the narrator) sitting in a bar, still hungover from the last night, wreathed in cigarette smoke, idly fingering the rim of his glass and with two beleaguered circles under his eyes. Like U2 has finally arrived at the party, but are totally unable to enjoy it not so much from physical exhaustion as from world-weariness.

You’re the car crash in “Stay,” but you’re the one crashing the car in “Daddy’s Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car.” These images are two of many similar ones scattered throughout Zooropa, images of information saturation and material obsession, icons of rich Western life at the end of the 20th century. So U2 comes around to using dance music, and they bend its artificiality into lesser-explored corners of their own conscience, dismantling and critiquing the privileged life of being handed a brand new car or of thinking it’s a logical way to spend your week by going out to clubs each morning till daybreak. And then, of course, being blasé enough to crash the car, or crash yourself. Given their state of their fame at the time, the excess they had access to, you’d have to imagine these sorts of takedowns would be directed inwards as much as at whomever is supposed to be at the center of “Daddy’s Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car.” This is why I’ll fight for Zooropa time and time again — most of U2’s other work just doesn’t possess this same complexity.