U2 Announce 2027 World Tour With New Single ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’

U2 have released “The Greatest Show on Earth,” the latest single from their upcoming album Carnaval de Luz, and handed the same title to their 2027 world tour. The record is due November 13.

The song follows “Silencio” and “Street of Dreams.” In an interview with Rolling Stone, Bono called it his favorite on the album and treated it as a reason to keep the band going: “It’s maybe our greatest song in a very long time,” he said. “That was a reason to stay in the band.”

Anton Corbijn, a longtime collaborator, directed the video, shot in the California desert, with the band cast in a religious cult where women do the heavy lifting. The lyrics carry a comparable tension: “If this is love, we make cathedrals of our hurt / People digging their dreams out of the dirt,” Bono sings. “We were once the greatest show on earth.”

That past tense sits oddly against a tour named in the present. The band’s statement frames the title as a dare rather than a boast: “A bit of showman, a bit of shaman, a riot of color, unreasonable guitar, bass and drums, and tunes you can hold onto. Because if people are gonna show up, we certainly are.”

The tour opens in February 2027 in Mexico City, then moves to Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires, with North American and European dates to follow. Adam Clayton described Carnaval de Luz as the culmination of five decades of work, which is another way of describing the scale U2 still insist on claiming.