If you are going to announce to the world that you are now an unapologetic nostalgia machine, you might as well go big. So big in fact that U2 – a band that have always defined themselves in terms of their “big-ness” – booked a slot during one of the many Super Bowl ad breaks in February to make a major live performance announcement. They are signed up for a residency, playing 1991’s Achtung Baby album in order at new venue The Sphere in Las Vegas in the autumn.

Usually Super Bowl ads mean a huge pay day for music, where the biggest brands in the world compete to have the most talked-about ad of the day, usually with a massive sync powering it.

Here, however, is a rare example of music advertising itself. The four-minute U2 ad was on an epic scale. It opens with assorted people in the desert unsure of how they got there. There are snippets of tracks from the Achtung Baby album and a montage sequence where various people from around the world are at their homes and it is revealed how long they have been U2 fans for.

They are peppered through the assembled crowds in the desert and among them are U2. A giant silver sphere then descends and The Edge says to Bono, “So, are we doing this?” To which Bono replies, “We’d be mad not to.”

Everyone follows U2 towards the sphere which we find out has a giant baby’s face inside it that says (creepily), “There’s room for everybody.” It looks like some kind of desert cult or a mass kidnapping – but everyone seems happy enough to go along with it.

These are the band’s first live dates since their last tour when they were playing 1987’s The Joshua Tree in order. And the ad dropped a few weeks before the release of their Songs Of Surrender album where they have re-worked 40 of their old songs.

For years – decades – U2 were insistent that they were not nostalgia merchants, forcefully tying all their tours to a new album, a new album they insisted made them current. Not like, say, The Rolling Stones who have toured for decades where 90% of the set is made up of songs written before 1972.

To give them credit, it’s a huge statement and one where they are not cutting corners. The residency pay day, however, will ensure that the ad costs will barely nibble the edge (excuse the pun) of their profitability. In that sense, this is the most U2 thing imaginable.