U2 is a band known for going all-in with whatever their current interests happen to be. A common trait amongst these lower-ranked albums happens to be not that they’re weaker musically — much of October holds up remarkably well — but that they feel less committed than the band’s other work. October is an always enjoyable listen, with only a few duds, but it’s very much a transitional work. Perhaps its most distinguishing quality is how prominent a theme their religion had become. Bono, the Edge, and Mullen were all experiencing an increasing fervor in their devotion, which yielded a crisis of faith in their profession. Later in their career, U2’s (or, at least, Bono’s) struggle with religion would produce some of their most complex and interesting work. With October, the crisis of faith was one of paralysis, leading to an album that didn’t go as far as it could have, while the band tried to figure out what they wanted to do with their lives.

Released, fittingly, in October, U2’s sophomore album followed Boy within a year. As a result, October is in many ways a logical extension of what they’d done so far, it just plays as a slight alteration rather than an expansion. U2 were still influenced by post-punk, though this time around the occasionally gothy atmospherics of Boy were traded in for something a bit more angular, even if it wasn’t anything quite as sharp-edged as what’d occur on 1983’s War. Despite receiving the whole deluxe reissue treatment a few years ago, October actually garnered fairly mixed reviews when it was first released. Even so, some fans have come to regard it as a classic of early U2 — a friend of mine actually claims it as his favorite U2 album — and the highlights do an admirable job of blending their early post-punk leanings with the growing incorporation of all the tricks that’d become certified U2-isms as the decade wore on.

The standout is obviously the classic “Gloria,” a song where the band uses a few simple moves to achieve a feeling that’s every bit as epic as more structurally complicated work from their mid-era albums, and more epic than a lot of their trying-too-hard ’00s would-be anthems. This and songs like “I Fall Down,” “I Threw A Brick Through the Window,” and “With A Shout” are actually all examples of moments where the transitional nature of October is pretty interesting. You can hear each member figuring out how to manipulate their instrument to craft the kind of drama the band would become known for, whether it was Bono’s voice taking on more confidence and shape, Clayton and Mullen beginning to lock into one of the most steadily propulsive rhythm sections out there, or the Edge starting on his path to becoming an absolute master of an unreal range of textures.

Outside of those refinements, some of the other uptempo songs aren’t all that interesting, and the small gestures towards true palette expansion are timid and don’t really go anywhere, such as the piano interlude of a title track and the seemingly interminable first half of “Tomorrow.” When I first got into U2, it was the mid-’00s and a crop of buzzy indie bands — particularly Interpol and Editors — bore a resemblance to the same kind of post-punk these early U2 albums had trafficked in. I feel like this may have contributed to a bit of a revival of interest in this era of U2, which coincided neatly with the band’s incorporation of a bunch of Boy tracks into the Vertigo tour. This stuff sounded fresh again, and I grew up with the assumption that the only U2 narrative out there was: ’80s were a straight run of classics, ’90s were a big mess after Achtung Baby. That doesn’t really hold up. October isn’t a failure and it has its moments, but it’s also far from the band’s most interesting work and it doesn’t quite rank among their classics.