VU is an album by the American rock band the Velvet Underground, released in February 1985 by Verve Records and consisting of material recorded in 1968 and 1969.

Sources disagree on whether VU should be classified as a compilation album, archival collection of outtakes, or a long-delayed studio album, though others avoid categorizing the album entirely. VU has been critically acclaimed both in contemporary and retrospective reviews.

When the Velvet Underground moved from Verve Records (which had released their first two albums) to parent company MGM Records, they signed a two-album deal, releasing their third album The Velvet Underground in March 1969. This was their first record with multi-instrumentalist Doug Yule, who replaced John Cale. Later that same year there was a management change and MGM Records' new CEO, Mike Curb, was brought in to try to rescue the financially struggling label. He decided to purge the record company of its unprofitable acts. The Velvet Underground were already inclined to leave the label by then and would later sign with Atlantic Records, which released their fourth studio album, Loaded, in November 1970.

In the meantime, in 1969, the band recorded fourteen tracks for possible release as their second MGM (and fourth overall) album. All of these were shelved and forgotten by the record company until the early 1980s. The band's drummer Moe Tucker later said:

We didn't say we'll just go in and lay down anything and screw 'em. There was a sense that it probably wouldn't be released by them. I think I figured it would just get picked up by the next record company, not realizing that MGM would own it. But when we switched labels, MGM wouldn't give up the tapes.

In the early 1980s, as Verve (by then an imprint of Polygram) prepared to re-release the band's three Verve/MGM albums on vinyl and CD, they found nineteen previously unreleased tracks: five Cale-era tracks and the fourteen "lost album" tracks, some of them in two-track mixdown format, some of them even on multitracks. The cream of the nineteen tracks was released in 1985 as VU; the rest was released as Another View in 1986.

VU is a selection from the 1969 tracks as well as two previously unreleased songs recorded with Cale: "Temptation Inside Your Heart" and "Stephanie Says". Since most of the material was available on multitrack (only "Ocean" is included in its original 1969 mix), engineers were able to clean up and remix the tracks.

As the Velvet Underground moved from MGM to Atlantic, they re-recorded two of the songs on VU ("Ocean" and "I'm Sticking with You") for possible inclusion on Loaded. Neither made the cut, but six of the VU songs were recycled by the band's leader Lou Reed during his solo career: "I Can't Stand It", "Lisa Says" and "Ocean" on his debut album Lou Reed (1972); "Andy's Chest" on Transformer (1972); "Stephanie Says" (as "Caroline Says II") on Berlin (1973), and "She's My Best Friend" (which was originally sung by Doug Yule) on Coney Island Baby (1976).