Following up their earthshaking Achtung Baby, Zooropa further embellished the new model U2. These are the superstars, after all, who audaciously reinvented themselves on their eighth album — exchanging chiming guitar for funkier riffing and dense, hip-hop-meets-industrial production, unrestrained wailing for insinuating talk-singing, fever for a bubbling heat. Zooropa, their ninth outing, emphasized the shift: Instead of the mythic, desert-landscape cover shot of The Joshua Tree (1987), there's deconstructed video imagery; for the desperate spiritual questing of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," they substitute the monochromatic dead-end musings of "Numb."

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