I haven't heard any of the new tracks yet...I'm kind of scared to. Are they really that bad?
No. They aren't gut-wrenchingly awful or wretched. Please don't get overexcited about it. They're just...uninspired sounding. A little dry on ideas. Not up to standards.
Let me put it this way - if it wasn't so very obviously Trent's voice, the songs would be completely interchangable with music by any number of bands in the genre. They lack distinction.
Go ahead, track the mp3s down and give them a listen. They're probably not as bad as you're afraid they are. Though I would be surprised if you really liked them.
Brief tangent: Trent's complaint about people getting a "bad first impression" of the new music because they're supposedly low-quality mp3s strikes me as a bit of a smokescreen. One of the three tracks, sure - ripped from the radio, it's pretty lo-fi. The other two though are 320 kbps mp3s, and thus really just barely shy of CD-audio quality. So long as they're final versions of the songs, that's as good (or as bad) as they get.
