Green Day Confirms Venues for 21st Century Breakdown Tour

New Album, 21st Century Breakdown, Due Out on May 15

Rolling Stone magazine has given the thumbs-up to the new Green Day album, 21st Century Breakdown, an ambitious 18-song rock opera that the three-man San Francisco/Oakland band debuted two weeks ago in its entirety at the restored Fox Theatre in Oakland. The Grammy Award-winning band has been warming up their act for their upcoming tour, which is scheduled to kick off on July 3 in Seattle, Washington.

According to David Fricke of Rolling Stone, the tour, along with the album, is going to be a hot one. The band played a high-energy two-part show on April 14th, the first part consisting of the aforementioned upcoming album and the second part loaded with 70 minutes of more familiar material. Said Fricke: "21st Century Breakdown is Green Day's best album. And at the Fox, they proved that the rock opera can be as punk as a Clash 45."

High praise...

Green Day has a lot to live up to. Their last album, the 5 times platinum and 2005 Grammy winner American Idiot (for Best Rock Album) also produced a Grammy winning song, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" in 2006 (for Record of the Year). The album charted five songs, two of which landed in the Top 10 ("Boulevard of Broken Dreams reached #2 on the Hot 100 singles chart but stayed sixteen weeks atop the Modern Rock Tracks chart). The album also garnered 7 of the 8 awards it was nominated for at the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards, due mostly to the video for "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," which won several awards including Video of the Year.

21st Century Breakdown is Green Day's eighth album. The group has sold over 65 million albums worldwide, 22 million in the United States alone. Green Day is credited with the revival of punk rock in the United States, sharing credit with fellow California punk rockers Offspring and Rancid, gaining a receptive audience in the 1990's with the release of their first major label debut, 1994's Dookie.