Pinhead Gunpowder – “Unt”

Way back in the early ’90s, Billie Joe Armstrong, frontman for the scrappy young Berkeley pop-punk trio Green Day, joined a new band called Pinhead Gunpowder with Crimpshrine member/zine great Aaron Cometbus and Skinflutes members Bill Schneider and Sarah Kirsch. Kirsch, who passed away in 2012, left Pinhead Gunpowder when Green Day signed to a major label, and she was replaced by future Green Day touring guitarist Jason White. Pinhead Gunpowder kept going even after Green Day got gigantically huge, and they’re apparently still going even now. Next month, they’ll release their new album Unt.

Billie Joe Armstrong is plenty busy these days. Right now, Green Day are in the middle of a gigantic stadium tour with the Smashing Pumpkins and Rancid, and they were pulled offstage mid-song last night in Detroit because of a drone-based security threat. Green Day also have a coffee company that’s doing stuff with Keurig and 7-Eleven, and Armstrong recently covered Jesse Malin’s “Black Haired Girl” for a new tribute compilation. Somewhere in there, however, he reassembled Pinhead Gunpowder to record their first new music in 16 years.

Apparently, the members of Pinhead Gunpowder have just been getting together for fun since releasing 2008’s West Side Highway 7″. They recorded Unt with Green Day collaborator Chris Dugan. The new LP’s title track is a big, bright, vaguely glammy pop-punk jam that easily could’ve been a Green Day song. Below, check out “Unt,” the new LP’s tracklist, and the stuff that the band says about the new record in a press release.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Unt”
02 “Difficult But Not Impossible”
03 “Scum Of The Earth”
04 “Oh My”
05 “Nothing Ever Happens”
06 “Draw It In”
07 “Shine”
08 “¡Hola Canada!”
09 “Here Goes The Neighborhood”
10 “Mumbles”
11 “Green”
12 “Chowchilla”
13 “Trash TV”
14 “Song For Myself”

Here’s what the band has to say:

Pinhead Gunpowder started writing songs in 1990 and made our first 7″ the following spring.

Nearly every year since, we’ve met up to play. Some years we recorded — five albums and eleven EPs — and some years we played shows.

But since 2010, we’ve been playing just for ourselves, something bands forget to do. Rather than “writing for the new album” or rehearsing to get ready for tour, we went back to the basement every year. We lived in the house we’d built, remembering how we’d made the music for each other in the first place. We played all over the world — well, at least Oakland, Singapore and New York — but only for each other. We worked on the reissues of our back catalog, too, and found ourselves fonder of each other and more family-like than ever.

A new record was only a matter of time, but between the members’ other bands, projects, and families that was hard to find. When we finally did, we were all surprised. We think it’s our best yet — our catchiest, most collaborative, and most poignant.

Unt is out 10/18 on 1-2-3-4-Go Records.