Kerplunk! by Green Day

Kerplunk!, Green Day's second album, came out on Lookout! Records, first in Britain in December 1991 and in the US in January 1992, and it's a snotty, sugar-rushed blast of punk. It was their first record with Tré Cool on drums, who replaced John Kiffmeyer after he left for college following the tour for 39/Smooth. The band went into Art of Ears Studios in San Francisco in May 1991, co-producing with Andy Ernst, got six songs down, broke off to tour, and came back in September to finish.

Billie Joe Armstrong wrote the words, and they're about love, boredom, alienation and what's rattling around in his own head, sung over his buzzing guitar, Mike Dirnt's bouncing bass and Cool's hyperactive drumming. "Welcome to Paradise" sprints and snarls, "2000 Light Years Away" is a breakneck rush, and "One of My Lies" sneers and hums. The cover art, by Chris Appelgren and Pat Hynes, grew out of a Larry Livermore story about a girl so obsessed with Green Day that she ends up arrested for murdering her parents.

Critics liked it, and several singled out what Cool brought to the band. UK pre-orders sold 10,000 copies on day one, and it became the biggest seller Lookout! ever had. Arriving in the wake of Nirvana's Nevermind, it got some people calling Green Day the next Nirvana, and once Dookie blew up in 1994 it topped the Top Pop Catalog Albums chart. By January 2017 it had sold four million copies worldwide, going platinum in the US and gold in the UK.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.