10 Obscure And Rare Hard Rock & Metal Albums
7. Green Day - Cigarettes And Valentines (2003, Unreleased)
Intended as the follow-up album to 2000’s Warning, Green Day had all but finished Cigarettes And Valentines in 2003, needing only the final touches - mostly a decent mix and mastering - to be ready to release.
However, when the master tapes were stolen from their studio the band made the decision to abandon the project completely and start all over again. The following sessions would end up becoming their 2004 album American Idiot, one of their biggest selling records, which would introduce them to a whole new generation of rock fans.
Supposedly Cigarettes And Valentines would have seen a return to their hard and fast punk rock roots, after the straighter rock heroics of Nimrod and folk punk of Warning. Copies had been made, but they simply weren’t the same as the originals had been.
The masters were eventually recovered, and some of the tracks have since been repurposed for other releases. For years there were rumours that new wave outfit The Network's 2003 album Money Money 2020 was simply a rerecording of the Cigarettes And Valentines material by Green Day themselves, who chose to release it under a different name, using pseudonyms and wearing masks. Until recently, Billie Joe Armstrong and co would refuse to admit that The Network were Green Day at all, although no one ever believed them - however, it’s never been proven that the Money Money 2020 record constituted re-recorded Green Day material.
To this day, Cigarettes And Valentines still exists in a safe somewhere as an almost complete album. Who knows whether it’ll ever see an actual release?