Billie Joe Armstrong - No Fun Mondays album review
"The effort Billie Joe Armstrong put into his 2020 lockdown project cannot be understated."
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 cannot 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.
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Ellie Robinson is an Australian writer, editor and dog enthusiast with a keen ear for pop-rock and a keen tongue for actual Pop Rocks. Her bylines include music rag staples like NME, BLUNT, Mixdown and, of course, Australian Guitar (where she also serves as Editor-at-Large), but also less expected fare like TV Soap and Snowboarding Australia. Her go-to guitar is a Fender Player Tele, which, controversially, she only picked up after she'd joined the team at Australian Guitar. Before then, Ellie was a keyboardist – thankfully, the AG crew helped her see the light…