Boy (1980)
1. I Will Follow 2. Twilight 3. An Cat Dubh 4. Into the Heart 5. Out of Control 6. Stories for Boys 7. The Ocean 8. A Day Without Me 9. Another Time, Another Place 10.The Electric Co. 11. Shadows and Tall Trees
There aren’t many bands that have known success quite like U2. In a career that’s now stretched across more than four decades, they’ve dipped into a wide range of musical styles and almost always emerged golden. While not every detour has pleased every fan, their brand has remained one of the most recognizable and globally resonant in all of rock music.
When this debut album was released, there was little fanfare. Boy was hardly a chart-topper, and the band was still far removed from the global superstardom that would later define them. At this stage, they were still a bit of a secret—one of those underground gems you heard about from a friend who swore by the cassette in his Walkman. But as years passed and fans explored the band's back catalog, this album stood tall. In fact, for many, it would come to be regarded as one of their best.
Recorded while the band members were still barely out of their teens, Boy brims with a youthful, nervous energy that U2 would never quite recapture again. That’s not a knock—just a statement of fact. There’s an electricity here, a barely-contained exuberance, that simply can’t be repeated once you’ve become one of the biggest acts on the planet. This is U2 before the sunglasses, before the politics, before the sprawling stadium anthems. It’s a pure, earnest blast of post-punk adrenaline.
The lead-off track, I Will Follow, is the one that gets the most attention—rightly so, as it’s the most familiar tune on the record—but it’s hardly the only standout. Out of Control is every bit its equal, and Twilight and The Electric Co. are practically begging to be played at full volume in a sweaty club where no one’s sitting down. Even the lesser-known songs, like An Cat Dubh and Stories for Boys, feel urgent and alive.
Only one real misstep, and that’s Another Time, Another Place, which doesn’t quite rise to the standard set by the rest. And that’s a shame, because the band had a wealth of early material at their disposal and might’ve picked something stronger. Thankfully, much of that early material would later surface in various compilations and deluxe editions, so the omission isn’t as painful as it might have been.
It’s also worth noting that at this early stage, the band hadn’t yet acquired their reputation for political and spiritual introspection. The lyrics here are relatively straightforward, more concerned with emotion than ideology. That innocence lends the album a refreshing clarity that some would argue got a bit lost in the seriousness of their later work.
Boy is one of those debut albums that gets better with time. Even if later albums were more ambitious or technically polished, few captured the band’s raw potential so vividly. For longtime fans, it remains a touchstone. For newcomers, it’s a reminder of just how electric a new band can sound when everything is still ahead of them.