Cigarettes and Valentines

Studio album by Green Day

Released

Cancelled; intended for 2003

Recorded

July – October 2002 (Studio 880 in Oakland)

Genre

Punk rock, alternative rock

Green Day chronology

Warning
(2000)

Cigarettes and Valentines
(2003)

American Idiot
(2004)

Cigarettes and Valentines is an unreleased studio album by American punk rock band Green Day. The album would have been the proper follow-up to 2000's Warning. In November 2002, the album was nearly finished when the master recordings of 20 tracks were mysteriously stolen from the studio. The band members would eventually call the theft a "blessing in disguise." Instead of re-recording the album, the band decided to start from scratch, leading to the creation of American Idiot.

During an interview with NME on November 18, 2016, Armstrong and Dirnt stated that they eventually recovered the material, and that the band is using the tapes for ideas. There are no plans to release the album, as the band wants to "go forward and move on."

Lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong said the album's material was "good stuff". Musically, the material on Cigarettes and Valentines was hard, "quick-tempoed punk" songs in the vein of Green Day's Kerplunk and Insomniac. This sound would have contrasted the group's previous two studio albums, Nimrod and Warning, which displayed more rock and folk punk genres respectively. Bassist Mike Dirnt described the band's decision of returning to the sound found on their older albums, stating, "We've had a nice break from making hard and fast music and it's made us want to do it again." However, Green Day would later call the theft a "blessing in disguise", believing the album wasn't "maximum Green Day". Dirnt admitted that backups of the tapes were made but claims that "it just wasn't the same as the originals". Cigarettes and Valentines was never even roughly mixed, according to various interviews with the band, hence no "legitimate" versions of songs, track lists, and artwork exist.

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Wikipedia