[2] Pressed for time, U2 wrote and recorded at a rapid pace, with songs originating from many sources, including leftover material from the Achtung Baby sessions.

The tour was an elaborately staged multimedia event that satirised television and the viewing public's overstimulation by attempting to instill "sensory overload" in its audience.

[10] After handling audio engineering for the recording of Achtung Baby, Robbie Adams was invited by U2 to manage sound mixing on the Zoo TV Tour.

[8] Additionally, Bono and the band's manager Paul McGuinness had discussed the possibility of releasing a "one-two punch" of records since the beginning of the Achtung Baby sessions.

The production crew faced issues with audio spill at The Factory, as all group members recorded in the same room as the mixing desk and Bono frequently sang in-progress lyrics that would need to be replaced.

[26] In the final weeks, the band decided to exclude the traditional rock songs and guitar-driven tracks they had written in favour of an "album of disjointed, experimental pop".

[26] One piece that was left off the record was "In Cold Blood",[29] which featured somber lyrics written by Bono in response to the Bosnian War and was previewed prior to the album's release.

[30] Other tracks that were left off the album included "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me", "If God Will Send His Angels", "If You Wear That Velvet Dress", and "Wake Up Dead Man".

[29] The instrumentation of the closing song, "The Wanderer", consists primarily of a synthesised bassline and was described by the group as resembling the "ultimate Holiday Inn band from hell".

The introduction to the title track, "Zooropa", contains a noisy collage of indecipherable human voices from radio signals—credited to the "advertising world"[33]—played over sustained synthesiser chords.

[38] The industrial-influenced "Numb" features a noisy backdrop of sampled, rhythmic noises, including "arcade sounds", a Walkman rewinding, and a Hitler Youth boy banging a bass drum in the 1935 propaganda film Triumph of the Will.

The Edge notes that the song was inspired by one of the themes of Zoo TV, "that sense that you were getting bombarded with so much that you actually were finding yourself shutting down and unable to respond because there was so much imagery and information being thrown at you".

[19] In the song, the narrator wanders through a post-apocalyptic world "in search of experience", sampling all facets of human culture and hoping to find meaning in life.

[48][49] The illustration, created by Shaughn McGrath,[33] was an alteration of the "graffiti babyface" by Charlie Whisker that was originally on the face of the Achtung Baby compact disc/vinyl record.

[51] These images are obscured by distorted purple text comprising the names of songs planned for the record that were provided to Works Associates during the sleeve design process.

Author Bill Flanagan speculated, "Record stores could become obsolete as music is delivered over cable, telephone wires, or satellite transmissions directly into consumers' homes."

Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone wrote in his four-star review that the album was "a daring, imaginative coda to Achtung Baby" and that "it is varied and vigorously experimental, but its charged mood of giddy anarchy suffused with barely suppressed dread provides a compelling, unifying thread".

Pareles enjoyed the sonics and electronic effects that made the "sound of a straightforward four-man band ... hard to find", and he commented that "The new songs seem destined not for stadiums ... but for late-night radio shows and private listenings through earphones.

"[31] The Orlando Sentinel gave the record a rating of three-out-of-five stars, commenting, "Although U2 leans heavily on the electronic sound of contemporary dance music, the rhythm tracks on Zooropa are less than propulsive."

[27][41] In a positive review, Jim Sullivan of The Boston Globe called the album a "creative stretch", noting that the band experimented more yet retained their recognizable sound.

He commented that the group's "yearning anthemic reach" and "obvious, slinky pop charm" were replaced with "darker corners, more disruptive interjections, more moodiness".

[64] Paul Du Noyer of Q gave Zooropa a score of four-out-of-five stars, finding a "freewheeling feel of going with the flow" throughout the album and calling it "rootless and loose, restless and unsettled".

[80] Jim DeRogatis of the Chicago Sun Times gave the record a three-and-a-half star review, calling it "inconsistent", but admitting "it's satisfying and surprising to hear a band of U2's status being so playful, experimental, and downright weird".

[87] In his acceptance speech, Bono sarcastically mocked the "alternative" characterisation the album received and used a profanity on live television: "I think I'd like to give a message to the young people of America.

"Lemon" and "Daddy's Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car" were performed with Bono in his MacPhisto persona, during encores of the Zoomerang Leg of the tour.

"[120] In 2023, Steven Hyden of Uproxx echoed Bowie's sentiments in a 30th anniversary retrospective on Zooropa: "U2 dared to imagine something that in the present moment seems to be of little common interest: the future...

I mean the future as it stood in the '90s, when people looked beyond the 20th century and envisioned a radically different world emerging from a period of political and cultural uncertainty."

'"[121] Edna Gundersen of USA Today said in 2002, "the alien territory of Achtung Baby and Zooropa cemented U2's relevance and enhanced its cachet as intrepid explorers".

Harvilla referred to the album as "a weird blip best understood as a portent of the burps that followed, a mega-band dipping a big toe into murky art-rock waters before belly-flopping completely with Pop and its subsequent crass, costly, cred-depleting tour misadventures."

While lamenting the band's latter-career creative output, he added: "Mark this record, then, as a celebration of a time when U2 was still musically daring; give 'Lemon' credit at least for successfully trolling you.