Green Day prepares to return with three albums

Ambitious punk-rock band Green Day is hitting the recording studio again, but this time they don’t intend to complete just one measly album, but a trilogy of albums that will be released consecutively in 2012 and 2013.

The first album, titled ¡UNO!, is scheduled to be released on Tuesday, September 25, 2012, with the next two installments following respectively on November 13, 2012 and January 15, 2013.

Lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong announced this triple threat Wednesday. As of now, it’s unclear what the content and sound of the albums will be, but the band says to expect something epic.

“Every song has the power and energy that represents Green Day on all emotional levels,” said the band. “We just can’t help ourselves.”

Green Day has transformed a lot since its humble beginnings as a noisy pop-punk band, playing underground shows and shoving over the amplifiers for the sake of shoving over the amplifiers. The band was part of the 924 Gilman Street punk scene in Berkeley, Calif. Many fans back in the day considered Green Day to be a sellout when they signed to Reprise Records, a move that in part helped catapult the band’s next album Dookie to commercial success.

The band’s sound has grown since its early days in the late 80s; it has become less grungy, more polished and increasingly conceptual as demonstrated by their political rock-opera success American Idiot, which was followed in 2009 by the somewhat less epic 21st Century Breakdown.

The band has been working on songs since the tour of their last album and things are finally coming together.

“We are at the most prolific and creative time in our lives,” said the band in a statement released by their publicist. “This is the best music we’ve ever written, and the songs just keep coming.”