U2 sent out mailings to signify this song’s release delivered on the day of the eclipse, 8/21/17 which quotes a lyric from the song: “Blackout, it’s clear, who you are will appear”, so it seems that’s the sort of black out by an astral body the song is meant to signify (metaphorically at the very least). The video was released at noon 8/30/17 on Facebook.

By signifying this song with the eclipse, it is self-referential, harking back to “The Fly” on Achtung Baby" – “They say the sun is sometimes eclipsed by the moon, Y' know I don’t see you when she walks in the room”. Self-referentially then, the song has a feminine as object . This was the same album where the moon was used as a metaphor for inspiration in the feminine -“Mysterious Ways”, which Bono went on to signify as the Holy Spirit with “The First Time”. The song approaches this more generally, which is the same tact taken for the third act of U2’s present tour, as discussed by Bono in The Rolling Stone: “The first act is songs that got us to The Joshua Tree. The third act was, ‘Can we go into the future and what would the future sound like and feel like?’ Then somebody said, and it might have been me, the future is about women. I really believe that, so let’s make it an ode to women. As you know, feminine spirit is crucial at times when the male hegemony is causing mayhem. After the Second World War, people like John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, whoever … Marvin Gaye, say – that’s a feminine spirit. The 1960s was a feminine spirit, and the 1960s was born in the rubble of the Second World War.

Great leaps forward of consciousness have a feminine spirit. Men start to look like [women], they grow their hair long. It’s a funny thing, the Renaissance. … Whenever you see the feminine spirit there’s usually a jump in consciousness.“ As for the sexual double entendre, the eclipse occurred on Bono and Ali’s 35th wedding anniversary.