Like most U2 albums, the new No Line on the Horizon will inspire great debate — and a few bar fights. But most everyone will agree it’s not their best. So which U2 album is tops? Stuck in the ’80s hosts Sean Daly and Steve Spears have been battling about this for years. Spears picks The Unforgettable Fire from 1984...or right before Bono shaved his mullet. Daly claims that 1991’s Achtung Baby is 12 tracks of brutally painful, pop-smart perfection.

Why Achtung Baby Rules
1. EVEN BETTER THAN THE OLD THING Bono called it “the sound of four men chopping down The Joshua Tree.” The dark, disorienting Achtung Baby, an electro-popping concept album about love and all its ghastly shadows, proved that U2 could totally implode its signature sound and be the best band in the world — again.

2. TAKE NOTES, BOYS I was 21 years old, a junior at Syracuse University, when I first heard Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses and Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World. And while the songs didn’t help me pick up women, they did teach how to act if I ever did.

3. ONE “Did I ask too much / More than a lot / You gave me nothing / Now it’s all I got.” One is U2’s calling card, their legacy, the most brutally honest song about love’s cracks and fissures you’ll ever hear on the radio. And yet, people still pick it as their wedding song.

To read Steve's Unforgettable prose, go HERE.