I Will Follow

Boy is U2 at nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one — the debut album of a Dublin band who had not yet become what they would become. Steve Lillywhite's production gives it a brightness that later U2 records replaced with scale. The Edge's guitar — the delay effect already central to his vocabulary — sounds like it was discovering itself.

I Will Follow announces U2 with total confidence: the guitar figure immediately recognizable, the rhythm section of Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. driving forward without excess, Bono's voice at its most direct.

The U2 catalog is one of the most debated in rock — their later bombast making it easy to forget that Boy and War were genuinely powerful records made by a band that meant every note.