Not that I don’t appreciate the celebration of Dookie but did they just like scrap the new album that was supposed to come out?
1039... really holds up vs other 1st/early releases by so many other bands on this site. Strength of BJ's voice and melodies in particular.
Yup, they really had their sound figured out right out of the gate. It's really impressive how good they already were for how young they were
Randomly saw a cover band this weekend who did Jimmy Eat World, Green Day, and Blink 182 sets. My main takeaway was that I had forgotten how unreal prime Green Day was. Dookie to American Idiot is such an insane run that I’ll still go see actual Green Day despite not liking anything since.
Honestly an all time 10 (11) year run. Can't think of many bands with a longer period of absolute peak releases. Maybe REM. I really can't think of many more at least in my view.
r.e.m.'s run was genuinely nuts. i think document and green are a bit less good than their usual fare but they're still solid and outside of that is two fully consistently great decades worth of material. not to mention how many of their albums in theirs in the 90s sounded wildly different from the next also i still dream of the alternate reality where warning was done with scott litt as theyd initially wanted to
Green and Out of Time are the slight low points in their epic run for me and I leapfrog New Adventures backward before Monster and group it with their stellar run (and I tag it as my favorite R.E.M. album).
My R.E.M. ranking is so wild and probably would not be popular. I just really love their late-career stuff.
Accelerate has a lot of fun, energetic songs and I think Collapse is as a wonderful retrospective for fans. Up and Around the Sun are the two later albums that I still have some trouble with (former is an experiment that didn’t quite work IMO and latter is too adult contemporary even for them and lacks life in a way I can’t really explain but feel very much).
One of my weirdest music takes is that I love Around the Sun. A beautifully lonely little album, imo.