No Line on the Horizon

U2 - No Line on the Horizon
Critic Score
Based on 30 reviews
2009 Ratings: #445 / 923
Year End Rank: #37
User Score
Based on 203 ratings
2009 Rank: #291
Liked by 7 people
Sign In to rate and review

CRITIC REVIEWS

100
Q Magazine

Simply, what this amounts to is the best U2 album since Achtung Baby.

100
Rolling Stone

He is still singing about singing, all over No Line on the Horizon, U2's first album in nearly five years and their best, in its textural exploration and tenacious melodic grip, since 1991's Achtung Baby.

91
Entertainment Weekly

No Line on the Horizon offers idealism spliced with new attitude and the same old grace, and is all the better for it.

84
Beats Per Minute

What No Line on the Horizon lacks in radical experimentation it makes up for in sheer strength of melody. The album is loose but never tossed off, joyous but never gratuitously so. U2 sound on No Line like they believe in themselves again, and as a result it is that much easier to believe in them.

80
The Irish Times

With No Line on the Horizon, U2 are no longer constrained by perspective or depth, and are free to throw the colours and shapes around and see where it takes them. They may not be the safe home ground of old, but they've arrived at a pretty interesting place.

80
musicOMH
As far as exploration goes, U2 seem to have finally found what they were looking for.
80
Record Collector

The classic-in-waiting .. is the seven-minute slow-burner Moment Of Surrender, its Brian Eno “rhythm loops” and existential lyrical questions echoing the anthemic universality of One.

80
Spectrum Culture
Sometimes it’s as the voice of an angry peace generation, sometimes as pop stars, sometimes anti-pop stars; the thing is, by this point they have nothing to prove and need to stop trying. It seems the best things come when they don’t.
80
The Observer
It starts out blustery and familiar, before gradually revealing an unexpected and almost lovable sense of vulnerability.
80
Mojo
The result is a collage of several kinds of classic U2 album, one that has the beauty of their panoramic '80s Eno/Lanois recordings plus the synthetic experimentation andd dalliances with pop merriment which revolutionized the band's modus operandi from "Achtung Baby" onwards.
80
Uncut

It’s U2’s least immediate album – but there’s something about it that suggests it may be one of their most enduring.

75
Coke Machine Glow
Though I'd hardly go as far to call it their best album, which I guess makes U2 irrelevant by Bono's logic, its best songs can credibly stand alongside their classics, and how many bands can maintain this level of vitality 30 years into their career? I give.
70
American Songwriter
Exchange “enemies” with “lyrics” and you have an interesting new meme.
70
Prefix

By this point, it's within their rights to utilize pieces of their past in building a new present for themselves, as long as they don't half-ass it and start turning out inferior remakes of their old tunes. That's not what's going on here, and if anything, No Line is ultimately a more visceral and memorable effort than either of the band's other two 21st century offerings.

70
Consequence of Sound

Horizon ... is an eccentric album — but for a variety of reasons. It’s not that the band sounds unoriginal or dated, it’s just that this particular sound has over-saturated the modern music scene.

70
No Ripcord
All in all, a departure from recent forays into overt commercialism that doesn't always work but provides a little U2 juice to keep the true believers happy for a little bit longer.
70
SPIN

With coproducers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois explicitly included in the songwriting, it’s an effort to tinker and rough up and refine anew their music’s essence — with nobly sketchy results.

70
NME
It has the pomp and arrogance of their best work, enough new sounds and interesting new avenues to satisfy the musos and, at its core, is a very good collection of very good songs played very well. A little more silliness would go a long way, though.
70
AllMusic

Upon first listen, No Line on the Horizon seems as if it would be a classic grower, an album that makes sense with repeated spins, but that repetition only makes the album more elusive, revealing not that U2 went into the studio with a dense, complicated blueprint, but rather, they had no plan at all.

62
Paste

On balance, No Line on the Horizon represents what October did all those years ago: a decent step forward that nevertheless recalls the past more clearly than it spells out the future.

60
The Skinny
At least on Fez-Being Born, they stick their necks out a bit: it's erratic, moody and reeking of Eno.
60
Slant Magazine
Such is the album as a whole: a compromise between the experimental and the pedestrian that makes for an excursion almost as tricky as walking a tightrope stretched between two distant towers.
60
The Guardian
A person of a certain disposition might feel the will to live seeping from them at the very thought of a U2 song called Cedars of Lebanon, but it turns out to be one of the album's biggest successes: a beautiful, downbeat coda to a confused and confusing album, one that can't decide whether it's ironic or sincere, experimental or straight-forward, and instead attempts to be all things to all people, with inevitably mixed results.
60
PopMatters

At the end of the day, No Line on the Horizon is an easy album to dismiss and an even harder disc to love, and some people will be ready to call it a masterpiece just as others are ready to deem it an outright failure.

57
Pretty Much Amazing

No Line is filled with stadium anthems, soaring power chords, “important” lyrics and polished production. If you love U2, then you’ll love this album. If you hate U2, this record probably won’t change that.

50
Sputnikmusic
A release that does have some genuinely awesome moments and more than a few head-scratching ones.
50
A.V. Club

U2 might try to pass Horizon off as atmospheric, but it's really just a grab bag of underdeveloped ideas that never seemed to command the band's full attention.

50
Drowned in Sound

Unfortunately, too much of NLOTH sounds staid and uninspired, again maybe due to the changing musical landscape that was going on all around them during the making of the record.

42
Pitchfork

Horizon is clearly playing not to lose-- it's a defensive gesture, and a rather pitiful one at that.

whyisaac
79

It seems like this is a hot take, but much to my own surprise, I really like this project. It's easily the band's best since "Achtung Baby" in my opinion. Despite a couple dodgy moments, it's stronger and more musically interesting than anything they've done in a while, and I'm not sure why it seems to be so unpopular, both among fans and the band members. I feel like if they had stuck with their original experimental intentions a bit more, and cut "Get on Your Boots", which ... read more

JakerpGuy
51

Keep in mind THIS album topped Rolling’s Stone’s best albums of 2009, beating the xx’s self-titled, Veckatimest and Merriweather Post Pavilion

why

AidenBowe45
72

In my opinion, U2 albums tend to have a point where they fall back on their generic sound, but "No Line on the Horizon" is different. While I don't love the album as a whole, I appreciate that the band seems to be trying with almost every song. After the successes of their previous albums, it was clear that this next one would be important for the band's future. They're leaning more heavily on electronic and experimental sounds than they have in a long time, which works well with the ... read more

jda1000
35

Why in the FUCK did Rolling Stone name this album of the year over xx and Merriweather Post Pavilion?!!?

SBells27
43

Still better than AM by Arctic Monkeys

whiteradios
65

Este fue el ultimo album donde U2 dio su ultima luz de magia y de hacer un buen disco. Aun asi en cada album va a ver un punto donde todo se derumba y deja de ser memorable a hacer un proyecto olvidable.

Purchasing No Line on the Horizon from Amazon helps support Album of the Year. Or consider a donation?