According to MTV it was probably the worst-kept secret in rock history, but it's a secret no more: Green Day have confirmed that they are, in fact, the Foxboro Hot Tubs.

They made the announcement in an e-mail to MTV News late Wednesday night, ending months of speculation that the Hot Tubs — a secretive East Bay garage act that appeared out of nowhere late last year and sounded an awful lot like Green Day — were actually Billie Joe Armstrong and company playing some sort of elaborate prank on their fans. It's the same kind of stunt they pulled back in 2003, when they released an album as the masked synth-rock outfit the Network.

"We think that the only similarity [between the Hot Tubs and Green Day] is that we are the same band. That is basically the only similarity," the Hot Tubs, er, Green Day, wrote in the e-mail. "We are Jason White, Jason Freese, Michael Pritchard, Frank Edwin Wright the Third and the Reverend Strychnine Twitch. ... We are four guys who love to play music and be spontaneous, [and] after a few late night jams and a few too many bottles of wine, we were inspired to record some rockin' eight-track recordings."

The album was released this week under the title Stop Drop And Roll.

The full Foxboro Hot Tubs album ' Stop Drop and Roll ' will be available for download  by clicking: here.