The Best of 1980 - 1990 (1998)
1. Pride (In the Name of Love) 2. New Year's Day 3. With or Without You 4. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For 5. Sunday Bloody Sunday 6. Bad 7. Where The Streets Have No Name 8. I Will Follow 9. The Unforgettable Fire 10.Sweetest Thing 11.Desire 12.When Love Comes To Town 13.Angel of Harlem 14.All I Want is You
Some bands are made for greatest hits packages. Others, like U2, aren’t. It’s not a question of merit—this was, after all, one of the most consistently excellent bands of their era, and the first ten years of their recording career yielded more than enough material to justify a retrospective. But therein lies the problem: nearly everything they released during that period was of such uniformly high quality that distilling it down to a single disc feels less like a celebration and more like an act of subtraction.
The tracks are all here—at least the ones you’d expect. Pride (In the Name of Love), Sunday Bloody Sunday, With or Without You, I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, New Year’s Day, and so on. They are, without exception, iconic. But what’s missing isn’t the hits—it’s the atmosphere. U2 was never a band that made singles in isolation. Their albums were built to be experiences—cohesive journeys of sound and spirit—and lifting songs out of context only highlights how much of that atmosphere is lost.
To complicate matters further, the band’s sonic evolution over the decade was considerable. From the anxious post-punk clatter of Boy to the wide-screen spiritualism of The Joshua Tree, and then on to the Americana experiments of Rattle and Hum, their arc was anything but smooth. Compressing that into 14 tracks makes the whole thing feel lopsided. The stylistic gear-shifts are too abrupt, the transitions too jarring.
Then there’s the strange decision to cluster the Rattle and Hum material—four tracks in total—at the very end, almost like an afterthought. The sequencing isn’t chronological, and the result is a closing stretch that feels oddly detached from the rest of the album’s flow.
The one previously unreleased track, The Sweetest Thing, was dusted off and re-recorded for the occasion. Whether it was ever intended to be a single remains unclear, but its presence here feels both welcome and slightly suspect. It’s a fine track—charming, melodic, undeniably U2—but so were dozens of others that didn’t make the cut. One could argue that its inclusion is less about legacy and more about marketing.
To be fair, for the casual listener, this collection functions well enough. It’s a concise primer on a decade of brilliance. But longtime fans will likely find themselves pining for the full albums instead—each one more complete, more immersive, more honest to the band's restless, ever-shifting vision.
Note: A two-disc edition exists, padded out with B-sides. It’s a marginally better proposition, if only because it captures some of the lesser-heard edges of the band’s early years. But ultimately, U2 was always an album band—and this package, though tidy, can’t help but feel like a compromise.