Will U2 Go Reggae?

U2 plan to release a new album titled Songs Of Ascent later this year and, according to certain sources, their second disc of 2009 will be comprised of reggae and dub tracks recorded during the No Line On The Horizon sessions.

U.K. tabloid News Of The World reported this interesting news of the album's potential direction, but there's been no confirmation.

What we do know, from Bono in a Rolling Stone cover story on U2, is that Songs Of Ascent is coming and will include a single called "Every Breaking Wave."

"We're making a kind of heartbreaker, a meditative, reflective piece of work, but not indulgent," Bono told the magazine of the LP. "It will have a clear mood, like [Miles Davis'] Kind Of Blue.

"Or [John Coltrane's] A Love Supreme would be a point of reference, for the space it occupies in people's lives, which is to say, with that album, I almost take my shoes off to listen to it."

U2's first record deal was with Island Records, the label founded by Chris Blackwell in Jamaica in 1959 that launched Bob Marley's worldwide career in the '70s. Bono posthumously inducted Marley into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 1994, so he's obviously a fan of the genre, and Marley's widow Rita has praised Bono's humanitarian work.

Bono performed with reggae artist Abdel Wright — who wrote songs while he spent five years behind bars for firearms possession before he released his self-titled, Dave Stewart-produced album in 2005 — at a 2003 AIDS benefit concert in South Africa. The Irish singer was impressed and called Wright "the most important Jamaican artist since Marley."

Releasing No Line On The Horizon almost back-to-back with something much different isn't totally without precedent. U2 followed 1991's Achtung Baby with the more experimental Zooropa two years later, and 1981's October was released exactly a year after 1980's Boy. But judging from the bashing this week's release has been receiving from many critics, perhaps the time is right to try something new.