BILLIE JOE ARMSTRONG

No Fun Mondays REPRISE / WARNER

It’s rare for an album of covers to rival any great artist’s own work. But the effort Billie Joe Armstrong put into his 2020 lockdown project can’t be understated. No matter how disparate the source material, Armstrong ties each track together with his big, soaring singalong voice and loveably gritty fretwork. You can hear how much fun he had dipping into his new-wave edge on “Kids In America”; when he hits the chorus on “Corpus Christi”, you can tell how strongly he envisioned howling it out to a jam-packed stadium. Perhaps most importantly, though, Armstrong doesn’t merely emulate his heroes on this tirelessly spirited love letter to them – he makes each song entirely his own, keeping the integrity of each intact while spinning them all through his own jammy and jovial punkabilly lens.