“Pride (In the Name of Love)” by U2

"Pride (In the Name of Love)" sits second on The Unforgettable Fire, U2's 1984 album, and it was the record's lead single: a song about Martin Luther King Jr. that sounds like it was built to be sung by a whole stadium at once. Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois produced it and engineered it themselves, with Kevin Killen and Randy Ezratty helping at the desk, and they let it ring out: a guitar that chimes and cascades like church bells, a rhythm section driving hard and straight, and Bono climbing until he's practically shouting from a rooftop.

The music is credited to all four, Bono, Adam Clayton, The Edge and Larry Mullen, Jr., and it sounds like a band pulling in one direction, earnest to the bone and unashamed of it. The critics weren't all convinced at first, and the reviews came in mixed, but the public didn't wait for them: it was a major commercial success and became one of U2's best-loved songs.

Time has been kinder still. In 2004 Rolling Stone placed it 378th among the 500 greatest songs of all time, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame counted it among the 500 songs that shaped rock and roll, and the band reworked and recorded it again for Songs of Surrender in 2023.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.