How long must they sing this song?

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[4.00]

W.B. Swygart: You better watch out, Imagine Dragons, cos somebody’s come back to claim his crown — and he means business! Though maybe the most notable thing here is how un-return-to-form this all sounds, like they actually can’t be bothered to pretend it’s not phoned in — those guitars, those drums, those same old marks getting hit again and again. It really is just like a pissed-out version of “Beautiful Day,” and that was cobblers to begin with.
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Edward Okulicz: Back in the mid-to-late ’90s, when every uninspired rock band put some lite beats and blurps of synth over their uninspiring rock songs, the already relatively tech-savvy U2 skipped the fad and gave us the comparatively adventurous and somewhat underrated Pop. Today, U2 have finally made the record all their followers made back in 1997.
[2]

Alfred Soto: “I didn’t even want the heart you broke” gtfo, especially against an intro electronic loop that interacts as well as a dead possum in a combine engine. Edge’s solo is too late — an emollient against the drip drip drip of Chris Martinisms. Good taste isn’t required of Biggest Bands in the World, but a proper taste for melodrama is. It’s like Zooropa never happened except for Bono’s trip to Sunglass Hut.
[2]

Brad Shoup: Rolling Stone said this was their best hook since “Beautiful Day,” but they also thought “Oyster Perpetual” was about seafood, so. With U2, of course, the best moments are embedded in the grandscape. It’s Bono saying, “I don’t dream, not as such,” and singing along with the “Moth in the Incubator”-style guitar line. It’s Larry Mullen putting the brakes on the propulsion, cos that’s what he does this century. It’s more or less those things. Otherwise, it’s a fistballing tantrum from dudes old enough to know.
[6]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: The Edge, speaking recently to the Hollywood Reporter: “We don’t ever want to be a heritage act. It might happen, but we’ll go kicking and screaming into that mode.” Alas, U2 have been a heritage act ever since 2000’s back-to-basics All That You Can’t Leave Behind — since that record, the order has been for dependable U2 music, dependable U2 touring, dependable pride to the Live Nation shareholders. It almost feels old-fashioned to listen to a new U2 song when the band have been a monolith for so long off the back of simply being around. “Invisible” is soaring, concise, oddly phrased by Bono — fine, it’ll do. It’s a vehicle to rejuice the heritage, whether The Edge knows it or not.
[5]

Jonathan Bradley: We are long past a time in which it is insightful to point out how timid and formulaic U2 have become since their All That You Can’t Leave Behind retreat. Think instead of how even during this late career stretch, soon to enter its fifteenth year, the band still produced the winsome gospel-pop of “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of,” or the salve that was “Beautiful Day” and “Walk On,” so guileless that a trauma-struck America could find uplift in their blunt force. Or the steroid-charged “Vertigo,” energized in spite of itself. Or the endlessly recursive self-parody of “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own” and “City of Blinding Lights,” both of which reduced the band to an Edge guitar riff and then reduced that riff to a preset, and yet were still charged with enough vague inspiration that, for the latter at least, Barack Obama took to using it as coda for his speeches: “we are the ones we have been waiting for” made vaporous so as to settle over arena-going idealists in their thousands. These songs are not great (apart from maybe “Moment”), and some aren’t even particularly good. But how much more effective, more competent, simply more functional are they than the enervated “Invisible.” Shit, these aren’t even funny-bad Bono lyrics; I don’t have the heart to poke at the “there is no there” refrain. The innovation this time is the “Since U Been Gone” drum machine and “Since U Been Gone” palm mute, which lasts only as long as the band can hold off that Edge preset. It’s not that U2 are now a bad band, it’s that they’re now worse.
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Josh Langhoff: Almighty and immortal B-n-, I’m haunted by the nightmarish spectre of You leading an arena of Your white followers in chanting, “There is no them; there’s only us,” while a twirling multibillion dollar video screen flashes pictures of African AIDS victims. Have You really never listened to “I Am Africa”?
[0]

Anthony Easton: Bono is a liar, and he will try to convince you that he is worthwhile of your love, affection or even attention. You know better than this. Moving away from his expansive call was harder in the late ’90s/early ’00s ubiquity and the only advantage to listening to this, is that he has never changed his sound, and it becomes easier to recognize how toxic this is. (This is why earnestness is impossible to understand, and how we are all drenching in irony; but it is also responsible for the earnestness backlash.) U2 is the reason why The Lumineers have charted. 
[1]

Katherine St Asaph: I have never understood the hate for U2, except as a taste shibboleth, a band you are supposed to hate because all acceptable rock critics do. “Invisible” is perfectly fine — fast arpeggiated chug, searchlight riff, everything primed to go big even before it actually does; a vocalist who doesn’t actually sing any worse than rock’s few remaining frontmen, lyrics that are dudely but no worse than certain critical darlings. If something about this is uniquely bad, it continues to escape me, which probably makes me an unacceptable rock critic.
[6]

Megan Harrington: I am casting my vote with extreme prejudice. For all their faults, real and perceived, I consider U2 my band. I know this is something that should be embarrassing, but it’s an incontrovertible fact of my being, like my parents or my birthplace. I had hoped to offer an impassioned defense of “Invisible” that denied even the possibility of disliking the song, but I don’t feel passionate. Truthfully, I think I like this song because its existence confirms my own. 
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Scott Mildenhall: Aside from alphabetically, have U2 ever been so close to Ultravox? The intro particularly has hints of a similar milieu — OMD, Fischerspooner — but then Bono comes in, and then he sings about his dad, and then The Edge comes in, and The Edge is fine and The Drummer is fine and it basically just ends up being a U2 song. Which is fine.
[6]

Jer Fairall: Poised and elegant, with the re-emphasis on Edge’s trademark ringing guitars after a decade spent perverting their sound with electro-gunk being one of the very few redeeming features of their post-millennial output. Bono, however, still treats choruses like a burden, his anthemic strain derived more out of obligation than inspiration at this point.
[6]

Cédric Le Merrer: As a kid I was the most horrible rockist little shit, you wouldn’t believe. This lasted well until my early 20s, when I realised I was listening to the same stuff as my friends’ parents. My own parents were not really big on music, and listened to things that made my Beatles mp3s seem terribly modern and subversive, or so I thought. One thing that could have turned me off rockism earlier would have been if my parents had pretended to have been cool in their youth, which is exactly what U2 is doing on this song: trying to make believe they always were among those cool new wavers everyone seems to love so much nowadays. They do a not-so-bad job of it until the needs of a stadium sized chorus ruins everything. In short, the correct reaction to this song is: don’t cramp my style, grandpa.
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