Shut your eyes, open your ears and it could be 2005 all over again. Madonna has just released a new album Confessions II, chasing the glitter bomb, leotard-clad dance floor highs of her 2005 opus Confessions on a Dancefloor. Now here’s U2, dropping the first single on Tuesday from their forthcoming studio album, their first in nine years, and sounding for all the world like we’re back in the era of 2004’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. Street of Dreams is a buzzy, uplifting number that has the likable zip of HTDAAB favourite Vertigo, and every bit of its radio-friendly sheen. Unos, dos, tress, catorce? This time, you’ll be hitting up Google Translate to hear Bono sing: “La calle, calle de los sueños/All the doors are open on the street of dreams” against sun-dappled guitars from The Edge building firmly skywards. (La calle de los sueños literally means ‘the street of dreams’.) Positive, affirmative, a little self-helpy; it’s musically neat as a pin and lyrically about as simple. “Your dream needs you/Your life (gonna find you)/Your fear (not gonna blind you)/Random angels (gonna guide you).”The sound of ambition is writ large on the record. Unlike their politically strident and deservedly well-received EP Days of Ash from earlier this year, Street of Dreams is an unmistakable stab at garnering radio airplay, one that alongside Madonna’s Danceteria, has a genuine shot of making it on to playlists around the world designed for both Gen X and Gen Z – no mean feat for either artist. That’s if the programmers are kindly disposed to the band, who in September will celebrate 50 years since their formation, when Larry Mullen jnr posted a note: “Drummer seeks musicians to form band” on the school noticeboard at Mount Temple Comprehensive in Dublin. It helps that they’ve been taking some notes from the Charli XCX playbook. As the song opens, Bono’s vocal arrives multi-tracked, stretched and slightly tweaked, layering and building until The Edge’s architectural guitars take over. The four-piece also follow modern methodology faithfully: don’t bore us, get to the chorus. (This is a trick they didn’t adopt on their other EP from this year, Easter Lily, whose six-minute song Easter Parade is a stunner.)Modern music doesn’t do long intros – no Phil Collins’ In the Air Tonight here. That’s for the live concerts, where U2 have always had the upper hand: their Las Vegas shows to launch state-of-the-art venue Sphere, ran triumphantly for 40 shows in 2023 and 2024.If Street of Dreams could pass for apolitical, the more subtle machinery around the song might not be. Their use of Spanish echoes the decision made by Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl half-time show, where he performed primarily in Spanish, a historic first, in a move that was viewed by some conservatives as a protest against US policies. (US president Donald Trump called his performance an “affront to the Greatness of America”.)Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen also filmed the video in Mexico City, where they flew the Tricolour alongside the Mexican flag. Street of Dreams might not be as bombastic a move as anything on Days of Ash (where Bono sang, “America will rise/against the people of the lie”), but there’s a whiff of protest there all the same. Ultimately, though, the game they’re playing here is the longer one, to plant U2 firmly back in the pop charts ahead of the release of the new album later this year. Let’s face it, if you want people to hear your protest song, you need to get them to your stage first.