Meet Dookie (Green Day’s Version).
It’s been three decades since Green Day solidified their place in punk rock with their third studio album, Dookie, and the band is celebrating the milestone in an unconventional and unprecedented manner.
To mark its 30th anniversary, the “Brain Stew” musicians collaborated with art studio BRAIN to drop a new — and deeply unusual — version of the now-certified double-diamond record that marked their mainstream breakthrough.
Appropriately, the re-release has been dubbed Dookie Demastered.
In what feels like an early April Fools’ Day prank, the first-of-its-kind “demastered” version of the 1994 album was released on Wednesday, Oct. 9 in 15 different formats, each more unconventional and purposefully low-quality than the last.
From “Basket Case” to “Burnout,” every song on Dookie’s tracklist is available in a different format, each taking the shape of a vintage-inspired household item.
“Chump,” for example, takes the shape of ‘80s animatronic bear Teddy Ruxpin, while “Pulling Teeth” was fittingly inserted into a singing toothbrush. “Finally, you can put Dookie in your mouth (not recommended),” the listing jokingly reads.
Other tracks are being released on a floppy disk (“Having a Blast”), a Game Boy cartridge (“Welcome to Paradise”), an answering machine (“Emenius Sleepus”) and even a phonograph cylinder (“When I Come Around”).
And, in a nod to Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong, one of the band’s biggest hits, “Basket Case,” is played by a “Big Mouth Billie Bass,” a spin on the classic wall-mounted animatronic fish.
As the band phrased it in a press release, the re-release comprises “obscure, obsolete, and otherwise inconvenient limited-edition formats … It’s Dookie, the way it was never meant to be heard.”
“Those deeply familiar with the originals may experience existential disquietude,” the Dookie Demastered website jokingly warns. “Extended listening has been known to provoke rage-nausea in audiophiles.”
Those who wish to purchase any of the 15 Dookie Demastered formats can enter a drawing for a chance to buy one on dookiedemastered.com. The drawings for each end on Friday, Oct. 11 at 11 a.m. ET.
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As Dookie turned 30 earlier this year — it was released Feb. 1, 1994 — Armstrong, 52, chatted with PEOPLE about what it was like for the then-indie trio to go from playing shows on the Bay Area punk scene to making their major label debut with the now-legendary record.
“I didn’t know, man. I was so freaked out at that point because we had taken the biggest gamble of our lives,” Armstrong said of making Dookie with his bandmates, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tré Cool.
“We knew what we wanted to do, the kind of record we wanted to make, and we rehearsed every single day before we got into the studio,” he continued. “We just wanted to be as strong as possible, and we felt like we made a great record. We were really happy with it.”
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