Green Day - A pop-punk assault on American idiocy

Active since the early '90s, California's Green Day have carried punk, or at least pop-punk – a necessary distinction to appease genre purists – to the top of charts across the globe. Forged alongside fellow travelers Offspring, this chart-friendly take on punk would spawn a whole school of imitators for a good fifteen years or so; Green Day would prove to be its longest-lived and most successful representatives.

Throughout their long career, Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool have always stayed true to the sheer simplicity of their punk-rock formula: two, maybe three guitar chords, drums and bass kept nice and raw, and a clear melody, spilled out over a flood of words, half angry and half having a laugh. They have, however, often tried to change or add some detail, delivering to their audience albums quite different from one another, never too afraid of betraying fans of the previous one. Despite the extraordinary commercial performance of their major-label debut, the legendary 1994 album Dookie, Armstrong and co. never rested on their laurels and kept reinventing themselves, starting with the follow-up Insomniac, which came out unexpectedly dark. The cross-pollinations that went into Nimrod, the band's experimental peak, and the full-blown rock opera achieved with American Idiot were even more surprising; the innovations brought in on that latter record were enough to reverse the band's declining trajectory and grant them a second youth. It's perhaps precisely thanks to this knack for mutation, and an innate ability to convey simple messages that still stay in step with the times, that Green Day have been idolized by well more than one generation. In short: for a good twenty years, Green Day kept getting older, but their audience stayed young.

Their approach to punk, highly melodic and polished, combined with the fact that the band never hid their ambition to reach huge audiences, has also earned Green Day a sizable army of detractors – especially among those who had followed their first steps as underground idols and would have preferred to remember them forever alongside the likes of Rancid and Pennywise. Critics too, while acknowledging their importance at least on a generational level, have never been overly kind to the Rodeo trio, who, for that matter, have hardly penned just a couple of underwhelming – or outright terrible – chapters. As always, the truth lies somewhere in between: Green Day have never been especially refined songwriters, but they certainly possess a rare gift for melody, which, combined with Billie Joe's ability to channel, with his sweet, mocking voice, the angry feelings that young people so often harbor against society and institutions, has shaped a winning formula. But let's take it in order, since thirty-plus years and over sixty million records sold aren't easy to sum up...

1986–1990: three young punks and a guitar named Blue

The punk rock that would go on to shape his son's life was a far cry from his own tastes, but Billie Joe's father, a truck driver and part-time jazz musician, played a major role in sparking a passion for music in the youngest of his six children. He certainly had him listen to plenty of it, and shortly before he died, when Billie was just ten years old, he gave him his first, beloved guitar, which the boy would go on to name Blue.

More or less two years later, in the school cafeteria, Billie struck up a friendship with the man who would become his lifelong friend and bassist, Mike Dirnt. The two soon began spending long afternoons (not) studying together, and their shared interest in punk and ska music led them, by 1986, to form their first band: Sweet Children.

The atmosphere in which the fledgling Sweet Children took their first steps was red-hot: the Bay Area was in ferment, gripped by a new punk fever. Bands like Rancid and Operation Ivy dominated the scene and would heavily influence Billie Joe and Mike's taste and stylistic choices. In 1988 Larry Livermore of Lookout! Records, which also recorded Operation Ivy, saw Sweet Children play one of their very first shows and, won over by the energy and melodic talent of the boys - who had in the meantime been joined by former Isocracy drummer John Kiffmeyer - offered them a contract, which the three accepted in no time at all. By 1989 their first EP, 1,000 Hours, was ready, but the trio decided to change their name before releasing it, to avoid confusion with another local band called Sweet Baby. They settled on the moniker that would make them legendary: Green Day. The reason behind this choice is well known: Billie Joe and Mike always loved smoking cannabis, and Green Day is a slang expression for an entire day spent smoking it by the bagful.

1990 would prove a pivotal year for the fledgling band. Lookout! would not only release their debut LP, titled 39/Smooth, but would also bundle it together with the two earlier EPs into what is still regarded today as the first chapter of Green Day's discography: 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours. It comprises nineteen punk-pop flashes that are still rough around the edges, often too rough, and quite similar to one another, but which, viewed in hindsight, reveal the band's immense potential. The melodies of "At The Library" and "Going To Pasalaqua", along with their riffing, are simple and effective, and Billie Joe's lyrics, angry but never truly dark, make for an easy, enjoyable listen. Also well worth a listen is "Green Day", which spells out, in no uncertain terms, the band's raison d'être.

1991-1993: a new friend, a tour with no end in sight, and Kerplunk

1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours wasn't anything groundbreaking, but it sounded fresh, and the sing-song, cocky delivery Armstrong showed off won over throngs of fans with remarkable ease. Within a year, Green Day's appearances at punk festivals across the US grew by the day and ended up turning into a full-blown tour around the country. After nearly a year of relentlessly hopping from one stage to the next, John Kiffmeyer realized that life on the road wasn't for him. He took a break from the band, intending to carry on with his university studies. He was soon replaced by Lookout drummer Tré Cool; the swift replacement allowed the band to keep going with the tour that was fueling their rise.

The chemistry between Billie Joe, Mike and the new drummer was explosive right from the start, so much so that John Kiffmeyer was promptly informed by his bandmates that Cool would be replacing him permanently. John accepted the decision with good grace... though who knows what he made of it some ten million album sales later.

Tré Cool's arrival in the lineup - of which he was, incidentally, the most experienced member - brought fresh ideas and solutions, kicking off a period of torrential creativity that in 1991 led to the production of the trio's second LP.

It soon became clear that Kerplunk would be Green Day's last independent record, and, at the same time, that pop ran through the trio's veins just as copiously as punk did. Helped along by artwork that caused a stir - the cover depicts a smiling white girl holding a smoking gun, while the back reveals her victim with his back blown open by a large-caliber bullet - the album immediately caught the attention of the music press and several major labels.

The blueprint here is the same as on the debut, but everything feels far more considered and - as much as is possible within punk - refined. The melodies are even sharper here, often blossoming into liberating guitar solos, and Mike fleshes out Billie Joe's choruses with backing vocals and countermelodies that would go on to become the trademark of an entire career. "One For The Razorbacks" and "80" are instant singalong numbers, and "Welcome To Paradise" - which would later resurface in a beefier, shamelessly radio-friendly version on Dookie - boasts one of the catchiest choruses Armstrong ever wrote.

"Dominated Love Slave" is a cheerful country-punk divertissement that reveals an unsuspected interest on Green Day's part in American musical tradition, while "No One Knows" slows the album's pace and, despite a fairly pronounced riff, is effectively the band's first ballad. Not everything works as well as in the tracks mentioned above, but it was enough for Kerplunk to sell fifty thousand copies and massively boost the buzz building around Green Day - so much so that between 1992 and 1993 their tour reached, for a number of dates, Europe as well.

1994: Dookie!

Among all the producers who, after the success of Kerplunk, took an interest in the Rodeo trio, it was Rob Cavallo who won out, signing Green Day to Reprise Records, the alternative-leaning arm of the Warner Music Group. Cavallo had a sharp eye, but it's hard to believe he could have even remotely imagined what was about to happen. Maybe it was the perfectly ripe timing - after all, a few months later the Offspring's "Smash" would put up similar numbers - maybe it was the heavy rotation of the "Basket Case" video on MTV, or a devastatingly solid stage presence; whatever the reason, Green Day went, seemingly overnight, from the fifty thousand copies sold by Kerplunk to the more than ten million racked up by Dookie. A commercial performance that was nothing short of staggering. But also an ambitious gamble that paid off. After leaving Lookout! to sign with Reprise, their old fanbase turned its back on the trio, and numerous punk clubs would slap the "sell-outs" label on their faces and refuse them entry - the dispute with Berkeley's 924 Gilman Street Music Club is famous in this regard. As Armstrong has stated in numerous interviews: winning gamble or not, Green Day could never go back to the punk scene. They had basically bet it all.

Nevertheless, the bond between Green Day and the San Francisco punk scene runs strong through Dookie. It is in fact the Bay Area itself that is the subject of the iconic cover art drawn by Richie Bucher - an old friend of the band and a well-known punk figure. Sure, a bunch of monkeys and dogs are pelting it with bombs and balls of crap, and a rather spectacular explosion is hidden in the smoke, but among the cartoon characters populating it, it's easy to spot familiar faces from the local scene. The album's title, meanwhile, is an indirect reference to the intense, grueling run of live shows that preceded it. Liquid Dookie - later shortened by Reprise to Dookie so as not to put off more squeamish listeners - is a slang expression for diarrhea, which Green Day suffered from at length thanks to the junk food they wolfed down while criss-crossing America from one coast to the other.

Recorded in just three weeks at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley with Cavallo's help, and with Jerry Finn (Blink-182, AFI, Sum 41, Alkaline Trio, Morrisey) behind the mixing desk, Dookie was written and sung entirely by Billie Joe Armstrong - with the exception of the ghost track "All By My Self", written and performed by Tré Cool - and played solely by the trio, who in fact showed up at the recording studio with the songs already written and finished. After listening to the cassette containing them, Rob Cavallo was blown away by the material he had on his hands and decided to focus solely on re-recording the tracks. His work, however, is evident from the very first two strokes of the opening track "Burnout", which introduces a sound that is far less grainy than in the past - if you'll allow the term - cleaned up. The vocals sit much further out front of the music than before, the bass and guitar are less smudged, the drum rolls are still as powerful as ever but tighter and crisper - the stop-and-go work on "Having A Blast" reveals Tré Cool's considerable technical chops. Dirnt is no joke either: go back and listen to how the two gorgeous basslines - the second of which was, rumor has it, conceived under the influence of LSD - on "Chump" and "Longview" flow into one another, linking the two songs into one wild pop-punk unicum.

As for Billie Joe's growth as a songwriter, there's hardly any need to even point it out - the choruses of "Basket Case", "When I Come Around" - punctuated by a slowed-down riff that has since become a template in its own right - and "She" are known by heart by at least three or four generations, and we're still playing them at parties today. The supremely melodic "Pulling Teeth" is a remarkable indie hook, probably influenced by the college rock scene of the time - Weezer aren't too far off from this territory - the kind of song that would make the fortune of countless bands to come.

In short, the punk-rock skeleton remained intact, but the sound - polished in a proper studio - and the crystalline melodies betrayed an unmistakable pop soul in every note. Even Billie Joe's carefree way of purging himself of rage and anxiety is easy to relate to. Across the fourteen tracks of Dookie, topics like nervous breakdowns, panic attacks, painful breakups, masturbation and mass killings are tackled, yet the tone always stays light, never spilling over into the nihilism typical of punk. This unprecedented balance is probably the real secret behind Green Day's success, which opened the door for dozens of imitators destined to infest the global charts for a good fifteen years - Good Charlotte and Simple Plan, to name a couple.

Much to the three members' chagrin, after the success of Dookie their live activity intensified even further, giving rise to legendary performances like the one at Woodstock '94, where a blue-haired, loose-limbed Billie Joe set off a legendary mud war against the crowd - during which Mike Dirnt would lose two teeth. Dookie's success, however, wasn't just a matter of audience numbers. Critics too, despite struggling to recognize Green Day's third album as a punk record, responded almost unanimously in a positive way.

1995 - 2002: reaction, cross-pollination and a slight dip

At first Green Day didn't respond to critics and old fans who, more or less harshly, disowned the band's punk roots. However, after the release of Insomniac, Mike Dirnt stated that the harder, at times darker sound of Green Day's fourth album was precisely a reaction to this kind of criticism.

Just as had happened with Dookie, Green Day wrote Insomniac entirely on their own and recorded it under the guidance of Cavallo and Finn, both of whom returned. The former worked intensely with Billie Joe on choosing amplifiers in order to get the most muscular guitar tone possible, while the latter cranked his mixer's levels all the way up. But the solutions used to achieve such a forceful sound weren't purely technical. Right before every recording session, Green Day would down huge amounts of coffee so as to build up energy and then unleash it instantly onto their instruments. Trè Cool deserves a mention of his own, since on Insomniac he hits his drums harder than ever: credit or blame, he would later say, not only to caffeine but also to his recent fatherhood, which caused him more than a little nervousness and, fittingly enough, insomnia.

The results of this "treatment" are evident in every song: the guitar riffs are harsh, the drums and bass push forward like a steamroller. The opening track "Armatage Shanks" and, above all, the granite-hard "Geek Stink Breath" are two punk punches below the belt aimed at everyone who had called them sellouts. Billie Joe's lyrical irony is also sharper here than in the past, and the targets of his invectives are identified with far greater clarity. A song like "86", a frontal attack on the 924 Gilman Street Music Club, would have been unthinkable even just a year earlier. In the long intro of "Panic Song" - yet another excursion by the band into the world of psychic disorder - Dirnt and Cool recreate a panic attack, frantically scraping the bass strings and mimicking an altered heartbeat on the bass drum; the chorus, by contrast, is one of the album's most melodic moments.

Released just over a year after its predecessor - it was October 1995 - Insomniac was a worthy follow-up, but it didn't come close to matching Dookie's numbers. Like its predecessor it reached number two on the Billboard albums chart, but sold around ten million copies fewer.

The cause of Green Day's commercial downsizing is probably to be found in the lesser appeal of such a heavy-hitting sound, especially to the mainstream audience that had driven Dookie's success, but also in the almost total absence of super-easy hooks - the only truly immediate ones are found in "86" and the closing "Walking Contradiction".

The cover art deserves a mention, in this writer's opinion the best of Green Day's career. Titled "God Told Me to Skin You Alive" - a nod to "I Kill Children" by the Dead Kennedys - the collage created by artist Winston Smith brings together clippings from old punk record sleeves and artworks, many of them hidden and only visible when tilting the cover at different angles. But while in Smith's original artwork the woman is holding a classical guitar, on the Insomniac cover she instead wields the beloved Blue.

The period following the release of Insomniac was a very stressful one. The album's sales hadn't been fully satisfying, and the band wasn't entirely comfortable playing in ever bigger arenas, ever farther from home. Billie Joe had meanwhile become a father and, just like Trè Cool, wanted to spend more time with his family. So, toward the end of 1996, came the drastic decision to cancel the European tour. The time spent at home, however, quickly proved inspiring for Billie Joe, who soon found himself with dozens of new songs on his hands, mostly dealing with themes like growing up and fatherhood - subjects very different from, and far more mature than, anything the band had tackled up to that point.

Despite the relative failure of Insomniac - if two million copies sold can even be called a failure - Rob Cavallo was by then considered something like a fourth member of Green Day, and was brought in to produce Nimrod as well. After all, for such an ambitious project - Billie Joe had set his mind on recording their own "London Calling" - one that would blend Green Day's traditional pop-punk with surf, ska and whatever else came to mind, they needed a producer with experience who was well aware of the band's actual capabilities. Naturally, all this ambition, along with the many new challenges Green Day had to face during the long recording sessions - which ran from noon until two in the morning - put their frayed nerves to the test. All three started drinking more than ever, Mike Dirnt spent one night wandering completely naked through the halls of the hotel where they were staying - the Marquis Hotel in Los Angeles - knocking on every room's door, and Trè Cool threw a television out of his room's window. The situation wasn't easy, but Rob Cavallo, confident in the quality of the work he was overseeing, didn't lose heart and hired his own father to act as the band's strict babysitter.

The new elements that Nimrod brings, spread across a full eighteen tracks and fifty minutes of music, are indeed numerous. The first song to sound completely unlike anything in the Green Day canon is "Hitchin' A Ride", where after a brief string intro, Dirnt's growling bass leads a brawling, street-level rock march. The instrumental "Last Ride In" is a relaxed surf-rock postcard, a quiet Californian evening with a placid sixties-style keyboard in the background and a few delicate splashes of horns here and there. A gorgeous western-style harmonica dusts the verses of the intimate "Walking Alone", in the middle of which Billie Joe also delivers a warm guitar solo, more fluid than he'd ever managed before. Ska, a fixation of the band since its earliest days, makes its appearance on the rough-and-ready "King For A Day", a party driven by a crisp bassline and sparkling horns. "Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)" is Green Day's most famous and intense ballad; it was written by Billie Joe, but it's thanks to Rob Cavallo's stubbornness that it sounds exactly the way we love it. The three of them strongly opposed the producer's idea of dressing it up with the caressing strings that make it so melancholic, but he insisted, sent the band off to play foosball, and recorded them in about twenty minutes.

"Platypus (I Hate You)" and "Take Back", on the other hand, are two of the most aggressive songs the band has ever written, with the latter - especially in the way it's sung - venturing without much hesitation into hardcore territory. Even the more typically pop-punk songs on the record are more detailed than usual - just think of the many gear shifts in the cheerful "Nice Guys Finish Last", or the guitars on the other big single "Redundant", which crackle a bit like those of Big Star and a bit like those of the Replacements.

It's certainly no "London Calling", but Nimrod is a very fine record and, without a shadow of a doubt, the most experimental album the trio ever made. Having broadened the horizons of their stylistic choices, Billie Joe proved he was much more than an ex-punk who had landed at the top of charts worldwide almost by accident - he was, in fact, an imaginative songwriter, capable of blending styles and influences without losing an ounce of personality. Despite the greater accessibility and lightness of its sound, Green Day's fifth album didn't improve on Insomniac's sales performance. Released in October 1998, Nimrod only reached number ten on the Billboard U.S. chart. Green Day's hardcore fanbase remained loyal to them, but it simply wasn't their time anymore. At least not for a while.

Often wrongly regarded as a minor entry in Green Day's catalogue, 2000's Warning is actually one of their most valuable records, as well as an important crossroads in the band's evolution. American Idiot is, to all intents and purposes, Green Day's first fully and brazenly political record, but it's on Warning that the social conscience of Billie Joe and co. first begins to stir and assert itself forcefully within their lyrics. Before and during its recording, Armstrong obsessively listened to Bob Dylan's "Bringing It All Back Home", ending up deeply drawn to protest songs. This influence is felt not only lyrically but musically as well, with Warning featuring an unprecedented abundance of acoustic guitars and harmonicas, further expanding the range of influences already stockpiled back in the days of Nimrod.

Built on a lively acoustic guitar riff reminiscent of Violent Femmes, “Warning” is the cheerful opener to a series of invectives aimed not only at the politicians of the day but also at the most disparate categories of people, from bigots to so-called fashion victims. One of the record's pivotal tracks is undoubtedly the magnificent “Misery”, which, between a vaguely Balkan guitar punctuation, a blaring Tex-Mex flourish and a mariachi finale, literally travels the whole world of protest song.

The instant classic “Minority” immediately became a live staple as well as one of the band's definitive slogans: “I want to be the minority/ I don’t need your authority”. As always, simple, concise and effective. Closing the show is the disconsolate ballad “Macy’s Day Parade”, which questions the possibility of a new hope to hold onto in an age marked by consumerism. There's no shortage, however, of the usual well-aimed electric jolts to keep fans still attached to the pop-punk of Dookie happy – “Castaway” and “Blood, Sex And Booze” above all.

The first record in the long partnership between Green Day and Reprise not to be produced by Rob Cavallo – who nonetheless had a hand in several tracks – Warning was also the lowest point of the commercial decline that had begun with Insomniac. Given the quality of the work, it's clear the album's failure wasn't down to any shortcomings on Green Day's part, but rather to what, at the turn of the millennium, were the new trends in vogue among young listeners seeking heavy sounds. It was, after all, the era of nu and rap metal. Green Day read the writing on the wall and for four years released nothing but a collection of B-sides and rarities titled “Shenanigans”.

2004 – 2009: “the political career”

As it happens, Green Day's seventh record wasn't even supposed to be called American Idiot. When the band and a returning Cavallo went into the studio after a four-year hiatus, the project they started working on was titled “Cigarettes And Valentines”. The four of them, however, weren't convinced by how the recording sessions had gone, and so, when the master tapes of the record's first songs were stolen, rather than re-record the lost material, they decided to start over from scratch.

If recording Insomniac required Green Day to down huge amounts of caffeine, on American Idiot they flaunt a sound so pumped-up and epic that you'd think they'd taken erythropoietin to achieve it – in reality, all it took was bringing on a second guitarist full-time, the good and loyal Jason White, who had already been touring with them since 1999. Travelling the world to play their rock opera, the band began wearing what was almost a combat-rock uniform – an all-black look broken only by Billie Joe's red tie – and adopting rally-style rhetoric, even using a megaphone to bellow out the attacks on the Bush administration in “Holiday”. They had become, to all intents and purposes, an arena band, but thanks to their by-then mature age – they had all turned thirty – and their rediscovered global success (they ended 2004 at the top of charts pretty much everywhere), they managed to handle the role far better than in the past, keeping an army of fans sporting the iconic heart-shaped grenade t-shirt fired up for years.

We mentioned rock opera, and American Idiot is exactly that. Across its 57 minutes, the record develops a genuine storyline, portraying – in the manner of the Who, whose discography the band studied closely at the time – the teenage anti-hero Jesus Of Suburbia in the age of Bush Jr. Essentially a punk coming of age story set during the Iraq war. But Jesus's story is only a metaphor for a bigger decay; American Idiot even goes as far as theorising a connection between America's social dysfunction and the election of George Walker Bush.

Divided into five movements and running almost ten minutes, “Jesus Of Suburbia” is one of the most ambitious tracks of the Californians' career, blending rock'n'roll, punk, pianos and xylophones, covering a wide range of moods and tones with great dexterity. “Homecoming” is just as long and adds emphatic stadium chants, bells and a wild Clarence Clemons Jr.-style saxophone to the recipe. Martial and direct, the title track and “Holiday” are two pop-punk cannon blasts destined to channel the rage of an entire generation. The same generation that would get choked up every single time – and there were many – that MTV aired the video for the sweet ballad “Wake Me Up When September Ends”. Another fantastic number in the bunch is “Boulevard Of Broken Dreams”, swept throughout by a snaking guitar reverb that blows the dust of every forgotten American road into the listener's eyes.

As if wanting to take a break from the success of American Idiot and the ensuing live-touring binge, in 2007 Green Day recruited Jason Freese and Kevin Preston of the rock'n'roll group Prima Donna, together with the usual Jason White, to form a garage-rock side project called Foxboro Hot Tubs. The result was a fun LP titled Stop Drop and Roll!!!, in which the expanded lineup channelled all the passion for garage and rock'n'roll that had always been readable between the lines of numerous Green Day songs. Both “Stop Drop and Roll!!!” itself and the irresistible single “Mother Mary” are absolutely worth tracking down. The rest is fun, but often feels like little more than a pastime.

And indeed, it was a divertissement. 2009 would soon be marked by Green Day's second rock opera: the ambitious but ill-realised 21st Century Breakdown. The nods to the Who are even more obvious here, just think of the airy, Baba-O'Riley-esque opening of the title track, in truth one of the few genuinely memorable moments on an album that's rather pretentious, full of ideas, yet messy and ineffective in carrying them out. Some of the blame for how poorly those ideas were handled probably falls on Butch Vig, who, stepping in for Cavallo at the production helm, failed to properly manage Billie Joe's torrential but often unrefined creativity.

Another major problem with 21st Century Breakdown is its inability to identify an enemy. While the Bush administration and the America that had voted for it was the clear, unmistakable target of American Idiot's attacks, Green Day's eighth record puts generic, half-formed ramblings into the mouths of its protagonists Christian and Gloria, aimed at anyone and everyone – from the Church to the media – who manipulates the masses; the end result is, frankly, a bit too scattershot. Still, within this overflowing river of eighteen tracks, there are a few fragments worth salvaging. “21 Guns”, for instance, is a very fine single that uses clean, restrained verses to build tension – much like “Boulevard Of Broken Dreams” did – before releasing it in a thunderous yet delightfully melodic chorus. Or “!Viva La Gloria!”, a spirited piece seasoned with choral backing and strings that feels lifted straight from a gripping musical.

2012 – 2016: an unpresentable trilogy, some addiction troubles, and the comeback

The period leading up to the release of ¡Uno!, ¡Dos! and ¡Tre! was marked by rather grandiose statements from the band, who proclaimed to the whole world that they found themselves in what was described as a creative zenith. According to Armstrong, the band was in a state of grace and was churning out new songs every day. As if that weren't enough, those very songs were being hailed as the best the band had ever written. In keeping with such zeal, what was announced wasn't a single record, but the famous, brazen triple release.

The failure of the infamous trilogy, with its covers depicting the faces of the three Green Day members – almost as if to crown the fit of compulsive narcissism that gripped the band in 2012 – was blamed on the lack of the usual live promotion for the records, itself attributed to the serious alcohol dependency issues plaguing Billie Joe at the time. But the reality was quite different, and much simpler: put plainly, these are three bad, inconsequential records. So bland that devoting a separate analysis to each one seems like a pointless exercise. ¡Uno! is in all likelihood the weakest part of the entire trilogy, and the tracks meant to carry it to the top of the charts – “Nuclear Family” and “Kill The Dj” – are watered-down retreads of the lashings that defined the early phase of their career. ¡Dos! was previewed with a trailer soundtracked by “Fuck Time”, a track featured on the record but already performed by the band under the Foxboro Hot Tubs guise. It was a clear indication of what the record would be: a hodgepodge of acoustic strumming and nods to beloved 1950s rock'n'roll. The intentions were good too, but this second chapter also suffers from the same lack of impact as ¡Uno!, so the raucous “Bay Eye”, a playful homage to Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and “Amy”, a track dedicated instead to the late Amy Winehouse, end up as oases in the desert. Things go decidedly better, though not quite well enough to earn a passing grade, in the concluding volume of the saga. Here we find a number of ballads on the table, among which the bittersweet “Brutal Love” and “The Forgotten” stand out.

A small curiosity: even though he doesn't appear on any of the trilogy's covers, these are the only three records on which Jason White is credited as an official member of the lineup.

Four years later, following Billie Joe Armstrong's stint in rehab and a long period of reflection, Green Day inaugurated their own recording studio by cutting what remains, to this day, the latest chapter in their discography: Revolution Radio. Partly thanks to a return to their comfort zone - the usual alternation of crackling big riffs and catchy choruses - but probably also thanks to lowered expectations, the result was a good record, their best since American Idiot.

The title track, for instance, is an excellent battle song - sure, nothing that can match the anthemic power of a "Holiday", but it works. The attack on an America that's increasingly - and increasingly easily - armed, titled "Bang Bang", also has real drive. Revolution Radio also contains a genuine gem: "Outlaws", whose churning guitar magma gives rise to a melancholy melody that sums up thirty years of career: “Outlaws, when we were forever young/ When we were outlaws/ We’re outlaws of redemption, baby/ Hooligans/ We destroyed suburbia/ When we were outlaws/ Outlaws of forever”.

At twenty-six minutes, Father Of All… claims the title of shortest record in Green Day's career - a band that, despite its punk intentions, has never made brevity one of its virtues. Given the album's partial merits, probably achieved precisely by refusing to drag on in the absence of inspiration, we'll count its length as the record's first point in its favor.

The others are certainly its immediacy and its willingness to play with multiple genres, to the point that some moments on the record look shamelessly to the parallel project Foxboro Hot Tubs or to the garage'n'roll experiments of the infamous numbered trilogy. Indeed, if 2016's Revolution Radio was a typically Green Day record, one that almost tried to reclaim the band's original sound and mission, "Father Of All…" is far more playful, spontaneous, and has a less narrow, less predictable range.

It may well be a bit of a rip-off of the Hives' modus operandi, but "Fire, Ready, Aim" really does have great drive, as does the title track, which unleashes an engaging rhythm and infectious hand clapping. Also nice is the warm bass of the cheerful pop song "Meet Me On The Roof", while the rockabilly groove of "Stab You In The Heart" works just as it should.

A bit too similar to the restless "Desolation Road" and "Jesus Of Suburbia", "Junkies On A High" nonetheless has its own merits, with a desolate atmosphere and a dramatic little piano. Compared to the hymn-like power of American Idiot the song is weaker, but its good melody earns it a place among the record's better tracks.

On the other hand, all the more typically pop-punk tracks ("I Was A Teenager", "Sugar Youth", "GRaffitia") fare very badly, clearly written on autopilot.

In any case, Father Of All… is absolutely not a record to be dismissed outright, as many will suggest.

2024 is a year of major celebrations for Green Day. Having now passed the 30-year mark, the world's most famous pop-punk power trio will this year celebrate, with a tour, both the thirtieth anniversary of the record that launched them, the genre masterpiece Dookie, and the twentieth anniversary of the album that, ten years later, confirmed them as a cross-generational institution: the rock opera American Idiot.

At the end of 2023, the band also launched a surprise mini-tour in small-capacity venues - including our own Magazzini Generali in Milan - so that Billie Joe, Mike and Tré Cool could relive the thrill of their early, unruly gigs. It's clear, then, that this is a moment of reckoning, comparison and reflection for the trio. And that this has finally led them, after a good fifteen years, to arrive at a version of themselves that isn't anachronistic, one that could find a purpose within the contemporary musical landscape.

And it's no coincidence, then, that Saviors seems to position itself right at the crossroads between the two records being celebrated. Green Day still feel the weight of responsibility as the rock agitators of 2004, but they've stopped taking themselves too seriously, recovering a bit of the irony of their early days, duly filtered through the sarcasm and hindsight of fifty-somethings. The most immediate fruits of this new balance are "The American Dream Is Killing Me", a kind of "Strange Days Are Here To Stay" with an instantly catchy chorus, and the dazzling title track. It's hard not to be swept up straight away by the killer little chorus of "One Eyed Bastards", or to be floored by "Coma City", whose closing section sees bass and drums pounding away just like the old days.

Age also brings a touch of melancholy, which, duly accompanied by Armstrong's enormous melodic talent, produces several ballads, such as the fine "Suzy Chapstick" and the (perhaps slightly too) saccharine "Father To A Son". A mention is also mandatory for "Bobby Sox", an instant classic that wouldn't have been out of place on Nimrod and that reaffirms Green Day's kinship with early Weezer.

Saviors isn't a perfect record, far from it, and perhaps has a track or two too many. "Look Ma, No Brains!" and "Fancy Sauce" add little but extra minutes to a tracklist that might have worked even better if slightly trimmed down. Still, it's a real pleasure to find one of the most iconic pop-rock bands of the '90s in such good shape and so fresh, once again comfortable in their own skin and full of the meaning and relevance they seemed to have lost.

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