21st Century Breakdown
It’s been five years since the American rock trio Greenday gave us a big hit with American Idiot. You may be wondering what they’re up to now. Well, the band is cooking up a new album which will hit the stores in May. The new album, which is the band’s eighth studio album, includes 16 tracks that are split into three acts : Heroes and Cons, Charlatans and Saints, and Horseshoes and Handgrenades.
What can we expect from this new album which is produced by Butch Vig at the very same studio where American Idiot, Dookie, Warning, and Insomniac were recorded? Billboard’s Jonathan Cohen, who was given the chance to preview six songs from the new album, reported that c “is chock full of social commentary about religion, war and love”. What could you expect with Greenday? That’s their signature, and they are good at it.
Greenday bassist Mike Dirnt has told AP magazine that the songs in this new album “speak to each other the way the songs on [Bruce Springsteen’s] Born to Run speak to each other. I don’t know if you’d call it a ‘concept album’, but there’s a thread that connects everything.”
Rolling Stone also scored a preview of the same six songs heard by Billboard and has this to say, “the songs are defiant, but also defiantly hopeful, referencing the unsettled political climate as well as more personal and generational turmoils”.
The songs to watch out for in this album are the title track (21st Century Breakdown), Know Your Enemy, Before the Lobotomy, Restless Heart Syndrome, 21 Guns, and March of the Dogs (which, according to Billboard, is the most structurally complex of all of Greenday’s songs).
Greenday is expected to begin a tour in support of 21st Century Breakdown in early July in North America. This will be followed by some shows in Europe. The band also will have shows in Southeast Asia and South America in 2010.
