But that was more than a year ago, and those lyrics wouldn’t make the album’s final cut. The other songs I heard that day would also go through many metamorphoses before the album was done: changes of structure, tempo, sonics.

And then, just as the album was all but complete, British and American elections shook up the world, delaying the album again and eventually bringing a darker, more directly political cast to some of the lyrics. “We needed some distance from it,” Bono said. “The world had changed. We needed to put things on pause to take in the scale of the change.” The album, “Songs of Experience,” is now scheduled to arrive Dec. 1.

It appears at a moment when popular culture is gathering its spirit of righteousness and resistance — a moment that could well be suited to U2, whose pealing guitars and martial beats have, through the years, become rock’s sonic signature of idealism. “Songs of Experience” merges personal reflections with tidings from the wider world, and it calls for compassion, empathy and rectitude. “The wickedness in the world, we just let it perforate the album,” Bono said. “But it still had to be a very personal album, not a polemic.”

He added, “The elections were a shock to the system personally and a shock to the system politically, not just in America but in Europe. This is my lyrical response to both of those shocks. I leaned more on the personal than the political, but the political is there to put the personal songs in the context of time, of history.”