GREEN DAY BURST ONTO THE SCENE — or, at least, the mainstream scene — 30 years ago with Dookie, the multi-platinum monster of a record that was largely responsible for dragging punk rock out of cramped clubs and dingy DIY venues and into the world of sold-out arenas, glossy magazine covers and near-constant radio and MTV rotation. And while the trio — singer and guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tré Cool — remain by far the most commercially successful punk band in history, they’ve also spent the last three decades taking a torch to any conventional ideas of what punk actually is.
Unless, of course, you ask Armstrong, who never subscribed to conventionality in the first place. “Punk, to me, has always meant freedom,” he tells Guitar World. “Maybe there’s some people where it’s just about being an aggressive punk-rocker and saying, ‘fuck society’ and falling into all those sorts of clichés. But that’s not my definition. For me it’s about getting into the deep end of the water as an artist. All that other stuff is just limitations.”
From the smash acoustic ballad “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” to the nine-minute, multi-movement epic “Jesus of Suburbia,” to the ambitious, ultimately era-defining concept album American Idiot (and its ensuing Broadway stage adaptation), Armstrong and Green Day have continually defied stock perceptions of what is and isn’t punk rock. Their last album, 2020’s somewhat divisive Father of All Motherfuckers, largely eschewed their characteristic sound in favor of a more Motown-, soul-, garage-rock- and hip-hop-influenced approach (with Armstrong even trying out his best Prince-style falsetto on the title track). And their new and 14th studio effort, Saviors, is yet another pivot, this time toward something that is both a return to form and a further pushing out on punk’s perimeters.
In the latter category would be tracks like the celestial, widescreen “Coma City,” the Eighties-style hesher-rocker “Corvette Summer,” the Fifties-rock pastiche “Bobby Sox”
