Green Day’s ‘¡Tre!’ Doesn’t Live Up to the Hype — Album Review

So, here we are: After a fast and furious series of album releases -- three albums in just under four months -- Green Day releases ¡Tre!, the final disc of their trilogy, today (December 11).

And while it really, really (really!) pains me to write these words, I expected better.

Maybe it's the hype. The final album should equal the most grandiose, the most ambitious, right? It should be something new, something unique. It should wrap things up in perfect fashion, put the cherry on top of a great three-album project. But, at least for me, it doesn't.

Now, maybe I'm just being too hard on Green Day. Perhaps I need to listen to the three albums in order, all at once -- which I intend to do today, actually -- to get the full effect. Perhaps I just need to give ¡Tre! another listen when I'm not running errands and doing other things. But it wasn't that way with ¡Uno! and ¡Dos!, both of which I pretty much adored from the moment I heard them.

¡Tre! just feels like nothing new -- like everything's already been done before. I did particularly enjoy "Brutal Love" and 'The Forgotten" -- the album's opening and closing tracks, funnily enough -- but the other 10 songs in between just didn't stand out.

After postponing their tour indefinitely while Bille Joe Armstrong gets his "ish" together in rehab, Green Day made the decision to move the release of this final installment up to today (rather than mid-January). And after hearing ¡Tre!, that move is telling.

I think they just rushed things when they shouldn't have.