Green Day will be crunching up the airwaves in the coming months as the Californian punks get set to release their new album, Revolution Radio. It’s a different beast to the triptych release of Uno!, Dos!, Tré! in 2012, which saw the band put out three full studio albums in a matter of months, but it continues the political disenfranchisement that lit the touch paper for both American Idiot in 20014 and 21st Century Breakdown in 2009.
Talking about the upcoming release of Revolution Radio, lead singer and guitarist, Billy Joe Armstrong described the album as a collection of songs about the chaotic state of America in 2016. The title track, for example, was inspired by a march he found himself in protesting a Missouri grand jury’s decision not to indict a police officer for the killing of Michael Brown, a young black American man who had stolen cigarillos and resisted arrest on the night he was shot twelve times by police officer Darren Wilson.
It’s easy to belittle bands that make politically motivated music, and when Billy Joe says “it was a trip to see people rebel against the old order” it all starts to sound a bit empty, but surely there’s got to be a little room for musicians to get at least some of their beef off their chest.
Release date
The new album will be released on the 7th October 2016 and it’ll be available on compact discicles, vinylations and sequentially coded as naughty and ones like a rapid fire, digitally focused morse code addict’s evening entertainment. There’s also a cool looking limited edition red vinyl (pictured above) available to pre-order from the Green Day store, so if you’re a big fan you might want to get a march on yourself.
Singles
Only Bang Bang has been put out as a single at the time of writing, but we’ll be surprised if there isn’t at least one more before Revolution Radio lands and then another after the release. It a fast-paced punk opera of sorts that takes a view from the perspective of a mass shooter, which you can either look at as an attempt at controversy or a credible effort to highlight the To Kill A Mockingbird universal empathy concept of walking a day in another person’s shoes in order to understand them a little better. Guess it depends on your personal level of cynicism.
Track list:
- Somewhere Now
- Bang Bang
- Revolution Radio
- Say Goodbye
- Outlaws
- Bouncing Off the Wall
- Still Breathing
- Youngblood
- Too Dumb to Die
- Troubled Times
- Forever Now
- Ordinary World
First impressions
Contrary to the title of the lead single, we weren’t necessarily blown away by Bang Bang, so initially it doesn’t look like Revolution Radio has what it takes to hit the same Hughes as the band’s earlier breakout albums. We’ve got a lot of time for Green Day, but it feels like there’s probably a bit more fine tuning needed here, but we’ll have to wait for the album release to make a call.
