Green Day

Green Day are releasing their 13th studio album, Father of All Motherfuckers, this Friday. Despite some folks pining for another version of American Idiot — something bassist Mike Dirnt admits that some expected from the band considering given the current political climate — Father of All…is not that album. Dirnt says that the album is closer musically to early Green Day albums like Insomniac and Dookie. Father of All… is 10 in-your-face songs that clock in at 26 minutes. It’s more The Ramones than American Idiot.

Green Day imploded after the December 2012 release of Tre, the final part of a triple-album project. The very unwieldiness of Uno, Dos, and Tre – all released in rapid succession in the autumn of 2012 – suggested that Green Day were perhaps suffering from a lack of focus, but the group wound up taking a forced hiatus once leader Billie Joe Armstrong entered rehab in the middle of the triple-album rollout. Given all this chaos, it's hard not to view 2016's Revolution Radio as a consolidation, a way for the band to shake off all distractions and get back to basics. Discarded alongside the mess and garage rock affectations that marked Uno, Dos, and Tre is any sense of concept at all – a marked departure from their work of the past 15 years…