10 Albums That Were Released Completely By Surprise

Every band should have the ability to play around with their sound from time to time. Even when Green Day had remade their own pop punk sound from the ground up with American Idiot, doing another rock opera with 21st Century Breakdown was not going to be an easy thing to throw together. They needed to blow off some steam, and they did so by surprise dropping an album by a completely different band.

Even though Foxboro Hottubs has all of the members of Green Day in it, you can completely understand why they would want to release this as a completely separate project. Coming after their operatic years, this is a throwback to the garage rock style of music that had become trendy around the same time, almost as if Green Day were trying out their best impression of bands like the Strokes or the White Stripes. Billie Joe Armstrong was always a fan of old school rock and roll though, so his turn as the wild garage rock frontman suits him pretty well, like the power pop of Mother Mary or the Kinks style sounds of Alligator or 27th Ave Shuffle.

Then again, this was only bound to be a one time project, with the band only doing tiny club tours to support it before getting back to work on the next project. For as much as 21st Century Breakdown may have left some true punk fans a little cold, this might be a deep dive worth going down if you wanted the more grimy version of Green Day.