Recording began in May 1984 at Slane Castle, where the band lived, wrote, and recorded to find new inspiration. The album was completed in August 1984 at Windmill Lane Studios. It features atmospheric sounds and lyrics that lead vocalist Bono describes as "sketches". "Pride (In the Name of Love)" and "MLK" are lyrical tributes to Martin Luther King Jr.
The Unforgettable Fire received generally favourable reviews from critics and produced the band's biggest hit at the time, "Pride (In the Name of Love)", as well as the live favourite "Bad", a song about heroin addiction. A 25th anniversary edition of the album was released in October 2009.
U2 feared that following the overt rock of their 1983 War album and War Tour, they were in danger of becoming another "shrill", "sloganeering arena-rock band". The success of the 1983 Under a Blood Red Sky live album and the Live at Red Rocks video, however, had given them artistic—and for the first time—financial room to move. Following a show at Dublin's Phoenix Park Racecourse in August 1983, one of the final dates of the War Tour, lead vocalist Bono spoke in metaphors about the band breaking up and reforming with a different direction. In the 10th issue of U2 magazine, issued in February 1984, Bono hinted at radical changes on the next album saying that he couldn't "sleep at night with the thought of it all" and that they were "undertaking a real departure". As bassist Adam Clayton recalls, "We were looking for something that was a bit more serious, more arty."
The band had recorded their first three albums with producer Steve Lillywhite, and rather than create the "son of War", they sought experimentation. Both Lillywhite and the band agreed that it was time for a change of producers and not to "repeat the same formula". The band had considered using Jimmy Iovine to produce a new record. However, they found their early musical ideas for the album to be too "European" for an American producer. They also considered approaching Conny Plank, whose previous credits included Can, Kraftwerk and Ultravox, and Roxy Music producer Rhett Davies.
Guitarist The Edge had a long appreciation of musician Brian Eno's work, and admired his ambient and "weird works". The band were also fond of his work with Talking Heads. Having never worked with music such as U2's, Eno was also initially reluctant. When the band played him Under a Blood Red Sky, his eyes "glazed over". Eno had brought along his engineer Daniel Lanois to his meeting with U2 intending to recommend Lanois work with the band instead. Eno's earlier doubts were resolved by Bono's power of persuasion and his increasing perception of what he called "U2's lyrical soul in abundance", traits which had become less evident on the War album. Eno commented that the band were "constantly struggling against it as if they were frightened of being overpowered by some softness". Eno was impressed by how they spoke, which was not in terms of music or playing, but in terms of their contributions to the "identity of the band as a whole". Eno and Lanois eventually agreed to produce the record. Eno explained that he focused on the ideas and conceptual aspects, while Lanois handled the production aspects. In Bill Graham's words, Eno's task was to "help them mature a new, more experimental and European musical vocabulary". Island Records boss Chris Blackwell initially tried to talk them out of hiring Eno, believing that just when the band were about to achieve the highest levels of success, Eno would "bury them under a layer of avant-garde nonsense". Nick Stewart, also of Island Records, said that at the time he thought they were "mad", but that the group's decision to stretch themselves and find an extra dimension became the "turning point in their career".
The songs "Pride (In the Name of Love)", "The Unforgettable Fire", and "A Sort of Homecoming" were initially composed at Bono's house in a Martello Tower in Bray Co. Wicklow. Recording for the album began in early May 1984 with a month-long session at Slane Castle, County Meath. Windmill Lane Studios, where they had recorded their first three albums, had no live room, so Slane was chosen instead as a venue where they could record and play live in rooms with good sound quality. The band and crew stayed in the castle, and living together during the sessions fostered a camaraderie. They chose the castle's Gothic ballroom, which was specifically built for music with a 30-foot high domed ceiling, and it provided a relaxed and experimental atmosphere. It proved so relaxed, that one day, the band went so far as to record naked. "We got into gaffer art", commented Bono. Their approach at Slane was that rather than use effects and reverberation to revitalise usual studio sound, they would do the opposite and use a live room to "tame...[their]...wild sound".
Randy Ezratty's company Effanel Music, who recorded U2 in Boston and Red Rocks the previous year, was hired with his (then unique) portable 24-track recording system. His equipment was set up in the castle's library with cables run into the adjacent ballroom where the band played. The generator powering the studio often broke down and most of the Edge's guitar parts were recorded with the amplifier outside on the balcony with plastic over it to shelter it from the rain. The ballroom turned out to be too large, so recording was moved to a library in the castle which was smaller, surrounded them by books, and provided improved sound quality. Barry Devlin and his film crew visited the castle to make a documentary for RTÉ-TV about the sessions. The 30-minute programme, The Making of The Unforgettable Fire was released in 1985 on VHS as part of The Unforgettable Fire Collection.
According to the Edge, Eno was more interested in the more unconventional material and did not take much interest in "Pride (In the Name of Love)" or "The Unforgettable Fire". However, Lanois would "cover for him" such that the two balanced each other out. Much of the album was later recast in Windmill Lane Studios, where they recorded from 6 June to 5 August. For the first time on a U2 album, a synthesizer was used; a Fairlight CMI was used to work up a number of songs, the textures of which were later filled out with strings and other orchestration. At Windmill Lane, tension grew between the production team and the band, largely because the band "couldn't finish anything". Twelve days before the official finishing date, Bono said he could not finish the lyrics, and the band worked 20-hour days for the final two weeks. Bono later said he felt songs like "Bad" and "Pride (In the Name of Love)" were left as incomplete "sketches".
The Unforgettable Fire was released on 1 October 1984. The album took its name and much of its inspiration from a Japanese travelling exhibition of paintings and drawings at The Peace Museum in Chicago by survivors of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The band spent a few days driving around Ireland with photographer Anton Corbijn looking for potential locations. The castle depicted on the cover is Moydrum Castle. The band liked the image's ambiguity and the Irish mysticism they saw in it. The photograph, however, was a virtual copy of a picture on the cover of a 1980 book In Ruins: The Once Great Houses of Ireland by Simon Marsden. It was taken from the same spot and used the same solarised filter technique, but with the addition of the four band members. For this copyright infringement, the band had to pay an unknown sum to the photographer.
"Pride (In the Name of Love)" was released as the album's lead single in September 1984, and it was at that point the band's biggest hit. It cracked the UK Top 5 and the U.S. Top 40 and would ultimately become the group's most frequently played song in concerts.
"The Unforgettable Fire" was released as the second single in April 1985. The song became the band's third Top 10 hit in the UK, reaching number six on the UK Singles Chart and number 8 on the Dutch singles chart, but did not perform as well in the U.S.
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