"Zoo Station" is a song by Irish rock band U2. It is the opening track from their 1991 album Achtung Baby, a record on which the group reinvented themselves musically by incorporating influences from alternative rock, industrial, and electronic dance music. As the album's opening track, "Zoo Station" introduces the band's new sound, delivering industrial-influenced percussion and several layers of distorted guitars and vocals. Similarly, the lyrics suggest the group's new intents and anticipations. The introduction, featuring an "explosion" of percussion and a descending glissando for a guitar hook, was meant to make the listener think the album was mistakenly not U2's latest record or that their music player was broken.
Berlin Zoologischer Garten railway station, colloquially called Bahnhof Zoo ("Zoo Station") in Germany, partially inspired the song's lyrics.
During performances of "Zoo Station" on the Zoo TV Tour, Bono would arrive on-stage as his stage persona "The Fly".
U2 performed the song during their 2023–2024 concert residency at the Sphere, with the LED screen displaying a concrete silo splitting open to reveal video imagery in the cross-shaped opening.
Achtung Baby is the seventh studio album by Irish rock band U2. It was produced by Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, and was released on 18 November 1991 on Island Records. After criticism of their 1988 release Rattle and Hum, U2 shifted their direction to incorporate influences from alternative rock, industrial music, and electronic dance music into their sound. Thematically, Achtung Baby is darker, more introspective, and at times more flippant than their previous work. The album and the subsequent multimedia-intensive Zoo TV Tour were central to the group's 1990s reinvention, by which they abandoned their earnest public image for a more lighthearted and self-deprecating one.
Prior to recording Achtung Baby, the Edge and Bono (pictured in 2024) began working more closely together on songwriting without the other band members.
The initial recording sessions took place at Berlin's Hansa Studios in late 1990 in the Meistersaal, a former SS ballroom.
Bono in 1992 as his persona "The Fly", a leather-clad egomaniac meant to parody rock stardom. He conceived this character during the band's 1991 recording sessions in Dublin.
The Edge on the Zoo TV Tour in November 1993