Green Day rang in the new year by irking the richest man in the world.
Singing the California punk trio’s George W. Bush-era American Idiot on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest, frontman Billie Joe Armstrong tweaked a lyric about Bush’s "redneck agenda" to register his disgust with the "Maga agenda" that former president Donald Trump hopes to bring back to the Oval Office. Conservative pundits and other figures on the right promptly freaked out, including Elon Musk, who told his 168 million followers on X that Green Day had gone from "raging against the machine to milquetoastedly raging for it".
For a band of longtime rabble-rousers, it was an auspicious start to 2024 — and a great way to drum up attention ahead of its new album, Saviors.
But as befits a group with deep roots in Berkeley’s radical-collectivist punk scene, don’t think that Armstrong is anxiously awaiting an invite to play a rally for President Joe Biden.
"I’m really reluctant to get in bed with any politician," the singer says. "Not that we’ve ever been asked," he adds with a laugh. "I think there’s a side of us that people might look at as being anti-American, so they hold us at arm’s length.
"But if we didn’t care about this country, we wouldn’t say anything."
The intemperance of rebellion and the wisdom of experience — that’s the balance Green Day strikes on Saviors, the trio’s 14th studio LP. Thirty years after the release of 1994’s breakthrough Dookie, the new album is by turns bratty, tender, furious, witty, knowing and aggrieved as the songs ponder politics, sobriety, parenthood and sex; the sound is gleaming but raw, thick with distorted guitars yet speedy in tempo and riddled with hooks. Rob Cavallo, who produced Dookie and 2004’s American Idiot, oversaw the recording, his first time working with Green Day in more than a decade.
It showcases one of the relatively few Gen X rock acts still capable of filling football stadiums, as Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tre Cool, all three aged 51, will do this year.
The members of Green Day know that some of their success on the road, including their headlining slot at October’s When We Were Young festival in Las Vegas, has to do with fans’ eagerness to relive fond memories of the ’90s and early 2000s, when the band was churning out hits like Basket Case, When I Come Around, Brain Stew, Minority, Holiday and Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
"They literally started doing emo nights [at clubs] like two years after My Chemical Romance broke up," Armstrong says of the pop-punk revival enshrined at When We Were Young, which also featured Blink-182, the Offspring, Good Charlotte, Sum 41 and dozens of other groups. "You’re like, wait, it’s not even old yet. Give it another seven, eight years and then you can feel the nostalgia."
It’s the day after Green Day pre-taped its New Year’s Rockin’ Eve performance, and Armstrong, Dirnt and Cool are seated shoulder to shoulder on a banquette at the Sunset Marquis’ dimly lighted Bar 1200. The three hung out here the night before after the show, Armstrong drinking the nonalcoholic Heineken 0.0s he says he enjoys with one caveat: "Those things make you piss so much. It’s like water and a diuretic at the same time. I had two of them, and I swear to God, I peed 27 times."
"If any of your readers have pee-pee fetishes," Cool offers, "Billie Joe is your man."
Armstrong has been sober for nearly 18 months. He quit drinking for about five years after an infamous onstage meltdown at the 2012 iHeartRadio Music Festival but began again "almost out of FOMO," as he puts it, meaning the fear of missing out. "I was like, I wanna have a beer and hang out with my friends," he says. "And then it just escalated. By the time I was ready to kick it, I felt like I was becoming a human garbage can: ‘Oh, there’s drugs around? OK, sure.’ I was acting really impulsively, and it was stressing out my family."
The singer says that he didn’t do AA or any other programme but that he’s careful about where he puts himself these days. "If it’s a social situation that’s intolerable without drinking, I’m just not in that situation any more," he says.
"You’ve probably had every meaningless conversation you need to have," Dirnt tells him.
"There’s no party I haven’t seen," Armstrong confirms. "So why do something where I wake up in a park the next day?"
Cool turns to his bandmate, suddenly serious amid his usual barrage of jokes. "We’re both really proud of you," he says.
As the New Year’s Eve kerfuffle made clear, Green Day is jumping back into the political fray this election year after lying relatively low during the Trump era. For the band’s last album, 2020’s garage-rocking Father of All Motherf ... ers, "we purposely stayed away from politics just because everything was such an easy target," Armstrong says. "We didn’t want to be like this CNN band. And I think in the back our minds we knew that Maga and the divisiveness was gonna be there four years later anyway."
Saviors opens with The American Dream Is Killing Me, in which Armstrong rhymes "huddled masses" with "TikTok and taxes" as part of a bleak (if darkly comic) portrait of a country overrun by homelessness, depression and baseless conspiracy theorising. "It’s the feeling of just being completely lost and confused in the era that we live in," says the singer, who adds that he wanted the song’s quick-cut images to evoke the chaos of a social media feed.
He remembers scrolling recently with his wife, Adrienne, when the two came across a vintage Jon Stewart monologue about Israel and Hamas. "And then Adrienne flipped to the next screen and it was an older woman with no teeth who’s singing into a microphone and then farts into it," he says. "It was like, ‘Wow, that sums it all up’."
Armstrong nods to those evenings at home with his wife in Bobby Sox, a fuzzed-out love song about sitting on the couch watching reruns on TV. In the song he asks, "Do you wanna be my girlfriend?" which he says is among the sweet nothings he often whispers to Adrienne. "But then in the next verse, I thought I should flip the script," he says. "I’m kind of playing the character of the woman, but it also felt really liberating to sing, ‘Do you wanna be my boyfriend?’," adds Armstrong, who identifies as bisexual. "It became more of a queer singalong."
Not long ago, the singer played Bobby Sox for an old friend about the same age as him. "And it brought a tear to his eye when he heard the second verse," Armstrong says. "Nowadays it’s more common for kids to be LGBTQ, and there’s more support. But for us, back in the day, that was like the beginning of when people were able to openly say things like that."
What do Armstrong and his bandmates make of the current moral panic over transgender youths?
"I just think they’re f ... ing close-minded," Armstrong says. "It’s like people are afraid of their children. Why would you be afraid? Why don’t you let your kid just be the kid that they are?"
Beyond the high-energy stuff, Saviors contains a handful of ballads in keeping with the ruminative sound of Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) and Wake Me Up When September Ends, each of which has more than half a billion streams on Spotify. Norah Jones, who recorded an album of Everly Brothers tunes with Armstrong in 2013, isn’t surprised that this once-scrappy punk band has scored some of its biggest hits in a folky acoustic mode.
"His singing has so much character, and he hears harmonies so well, which not all frontpeople do," she says of Armstrong.
The most affecting ballad on Saviors is Father to a Son, about Armstrong’s discovery that "a love could be scarier than anger".
"Becoming a dad so young, I was really immature," he says regarding his two sons, now both in their 20s. "My wife led the charge, because she’s just a natural-born caregiver. I had to figure out how to grow up, and I know I f ... ed up as a father. But your hope is that you didn’t break their heart in any way." — TCA
