U2 released its first new music in nearly a decade on Ash Wednesday, and the lead track on the six-song EP “Days of Ash” joins the growing list of anti-DHS protest songs. Though “American Obituary” sounds like the title for a requiem for the United States, it’s actually an elegy for Renee Good.
Renee Good, born to die free
American mother of three
seventh day January
a bullet for each child, as you can see
Renee, the ‘domestic terrorist’?
What you can’t kill can’t die
America will rise against the people of the lie
In an extensive fanzine interview, Bono characterised Good as “a woman committed to nonviolent civil disobedience.”
He said he was deeply troubled by her being dubbed a domestic terrorist by Kristi Noem, head of the US Department of Homeland Security. “This was an attempt to assassinate meaning itself, the meaning of words, the meaning of truth,” Bono said. “If you let people [get] away with that, you can kiss your democracy goodbye.”
“American Obituary” is just one of the topical songs on the EP. “One Life at a Time” is about Awdah Hathaleen, the Palestinian activist killed last July 2025 by an Israeli West Bank colonizer. “Song of the Future” spotlights the Women, Life, Freedom protest movement in Iran and namechecks Sarina Esmailzadeh, the 16-year-old died in 2022 after a brutal beating from the Ayatollah’s security forces.
