“Please don’t pass me by,” Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong sings near the beginning of ‘Oh Love,’ the first single from the first album of his band’s forthcoming trio of full-length releases, which are titled ‘¡Uno!,’ ‘¡Dos!,’ and ‘¡Tre!’ and are scheduled to drop in a series starting in September of this year, running through January 2013. While there was a  period in the early part of the decade when it looked like music fans had moved on from Green Day, it seems like these days they have nothing to worry about — nobody is going to be passing them by.

The mid-to-late aughts welcomed the arrival of Green Day’s ambitious one-two punk rock opera punch of ‘American Idiot’ and ’21st Century Breakdown,’ the pair of discs that saved them from relative obscurity, and the equally-if-not-more-so ambitious ‘¡Uno!,’ ‘¡Dos!,’ and ‘¡Tre!’ seems certain to continue the hit parade.

As for ‘Oh Love,’ the single delivers on the band’s promise that ‘¡Uno!’ will captures a somewhat surprising stylistic theme. “We were just thinking about making a killer power-pop record — dirtier, back to basics,” bassist Mike Dirnt tells Rolling Stone, adding that they even looked to the very un-punk Rolling Stones for inspiration. “We tapped into our version of ‘Exile on Main Street,’” he says, referring to the Stones’ classic 1967 platter.

That said, ‘Love’ still stands out for sounding like a piece of a greater puzzle. Whether a punk rock opera or not, ‘¡Uno! seems likely to best be experienced as a whole — although we’ll have to wait to find out for sure.

Listen to Green Day, ‘Oh Love’
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