War was the album that U2 started turning into the U2 we know them as today-before that, they'd been a kind of punky/New Wave type thing, not really the socially conscious activist rockers that they wound up spending most of the rest of the 80s as. They were still filing the edges off their sound, refining it, and War is pretty well a halfway point between their earlier approach and the band they became. You didn't really get the sense of how big they were going to be when New Year's Day came out, though there was a sense of seeing these guys mature pretty quickly over their early output and that they were going to be pretty successful. But wow, did they blow up HUGE over the next few years!