"This is Green Day? Is this Green Day?" Throughout nearly the entirety of my first listen to Father of All Motherfuckers, I legitimately questioned whether the leak I downloaded four days before the band's thirteenth studio album officially dropped had been incorrectly tagged and was actually a different group altogether. Indeed it is the California trio, and I'm not the only one with confused ears. Opinions and reviews have called it everything between righteous and reprehensible. 

For me, like any fifth grader in 1994 when Dookie came out, Green Day will always be framed through the lens of their third album. (Unless you were one of those uber-hip 10-year-olds who was lamenting that the band had sold out after Kerplunk.) The way their career has since unfolded continues to astound me to no end: that they are still together some thirty years after their debut; the 20 million-plus copies sold of Dookie; the inescapable prom hit that is "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)"; that American Idiot became not only a musical, but served as a mouthpiece of the zeitgeist for innumerable citizens during the George W. Bush years of the mid-aughts.  

Here we are in 2020, and once again Billie Joe Armstrong zags when everyone expects him to zig. Father of All Motherfuckers is nothing more than 26 minutes of catchy rock/pop/punk (probably in that order), with zero fucks given to what anyone might want. If you're a die-hard Green Day fan, you may dismissively be asking yourself the question I posed at the beginning of this write-up. I'm less concerned about who it is, than what it is: three dudes having a blast over ten tracks that roll by so quickly, you just might find yourself itching to let the album repeat before it even wraps up.