Twenty years ago today, on July 5, 1993, U2 released Zooropa, their eighth studio album. Achtung Baby, which arrived about 18 months earlier, was the first U2 album I ever purchased, precipitating a back-catalog buying spree as I attempted to play catch up.

Though I’ve purchased every subsequent U2 album to date, Zooropa marks the zenith of my fandom, a set inextricably tied up in memories and associations. Arriving at a time and place when the familiar gave way to the foreign before circling back again, Zooropa was my soundtrack to a fantastic, strange summer during which everything and nothing changed.

Zooropa‘s 10 songs underscored time spent with friends old and new (a distance of 200 miles separating the two), a few evenings’ worth of personal reflection and reverie (one, lugging my boombox up to a rooftop deck and listening to my Zooropa CD under the stars), and an overlong stretch of clumsy, complicated affection. Because, as Bono sings in “Numb” — in ‘Fat Lady’ falsetto, naturally — “Too much is not enough.”

Zooropa‘s melange of alt-rock, dance, and industrial elements — plus Johnny Cash — is a snapshot of where music had been and was going in 1993 (“These are the days when we look for something other”). But two decades on, this fascinating view through U2’s lens remains worth wandering through, even if you still haven’t settled upon an answer to the question posed at the album’s start, “What do you want?”

In retrospect, maybe that’s better by design.

Purchase U2 – Zooropa via iTunes, Amazon MP3.