Swagger, Not Style

4. Boy (1980)

“I started a landslide in my ego / I look from the outside to the world I left behind.”

— “A Day Without Me”

Songs of innocence and inexperience. Bass-spaceman Adam Clayton, the elder member of the band, was all of 20 when U2 issued their debut, and one of the things that makes this album still feel unique 30 years later is that the four boys who made it sound like they’re in no rush to grow up. Most guys want to front their way through puberty as quickly as possible, but there’s Bono, as unembarrassable then as he is now — that’s a compliment, mostly — singing, “My body grows and grows / It frightens me, you know!” on “Twilight.” Something about that title must really resonate for ‘tweens.

It would take 10 years for any hint of sex to show up on a U2 album. In 1981, these guys don’t sound like they’re even talking to girls yet. Even so, lifelong Bono pal Gavin Friday claims “An Cat Dubh” is about a Bono dalliance while split from his then-girlfriend, Alison Stewart (no relation to Allison Stewart, the Washington Post music contributor and Singles File scribe), to whom he’s now been married since 1982.

The disc opens with “I Will Follow,” a declaration of blind faith that acknowledges its young authors’ debt to groups like Television while still sounding like nothing else. All of U2′s sonic signposts — Edge’s reveb-drenched guitar, the unique throb of the learning-on-the-fly rhythm section — are already here. It would take them years to make another album this confident.