NME reports that 80’s rock giants U2 have today announced that they will be touring their iconic album The Joshua Tree in full, to commemorate 30 years since it’s release. The four piece shared a video on the band’s Facebook page over the festive period, confirming the tour for 2017.

During the video, the band also confirmed that their new album Songs of Experience will be released this year. Bono said in the video that “Next year [2017] is going to be a big year for the U2 group. We have ‘Songs Of Experience’ coming, and to honour 30 years of ‘The Joshua Tree’, we have some very, very special shows coming,” The special dates will mark U2’s first venture into retrospective touring of classic albums, and more dates and details are expected to be announced over the coming weeks.

Songs of Experience will mark the band’s first release since 2014’s Song of Innocence, and guitarist The Edge recently revealed that the band had written over 50 songs for the new album. The guitarist also  compared the style of the new album to U2’s 1993 effort Zooropa. “[producer Brian Eno] would love to see us making albums a bit more like that. Where we go, ‘You know what? We’re not going to second-guess any of this. Let’s just go for it.’ I think there’s a quality you get when there’s a certain momentum to the process,” The Edge added.

Bono was also quoted discussing the impact of the motorocycle crash he suffered at the turn of 2014/15 has had on his writing, choosing to see it positively, saying “The gift of it was that I had time to write while in the mentality that you get to at the end of an album,” he explained, before elabrating “There is a reason why all the great groups made their best albums while in and around touring, because the ideas have to come out of your head.”