Stadium rockers U2 look set to open up the new year with their thirteenth (yes, you read that correctly, thirteenth) studio album. Tentatively titled ‘Songs of Ascent’ we thought we would ask the Last.fm Trends team to take a look at their previous twelve studio albums to see what has been performing the best and why.

The chart below shows us the releases in order of release date from top to bottom, suggesting to us that the Irish band’s latest material has, largely, been their most popular amongst Last.fm users.

The Joshua Tree, often seen as the band’s seminal album and released in 1987, flies the flag for the band’s older material, clocking in at 5,883,584 scrobbles.

Most of that would probably be down to the track ‘With Or Without You’ which incidentally is the band’s most scrobbled track overall on Last.fm with 3,420,830 scrobbles.

Achtung Baby is the only other pre-00′s release with a considerable amount of scrobbles on the U2-ometer, registering 5,246,295 scrobbles.

The release was warmly received by critics after some critical backlash against their previous release Rattle And Hum (reflected with the relatively low scrobble count of 2,213,554) and won a Grammy Award in 1993.

And so we come to the 21st century U2 material with all three of the releases making the band’s top five.

The most played release is their eleventh effort How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb which boasts 6,961,135 scrobbles and features various hits such as ‘Vertigo’ and ‘City Of Blinding Lights’.

Make sure your U2 listens count by heading to Last.fm now.