How Green Day is saving rock ‘n’ roll with new ‘Saviors’ album — 30 years after ‘Dookie’
Sometimes, dookie happens.
And when you name an album “Dookie,” clearly you’re not taking yourselves too seriously.
But here we are — 30 years after Green Day released its blockbuster breakthrough on Feb. 1, 1994 — and the Cali trio of singer-guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tré Cool is still punking us.
But three decades after the group’s major-label debut “Dookie” — featuring the now-classic rock hits “Longview,” “Basket Case” and, biggest of all, “When I Come Around” — wrestled rock from grunge’s grasp in the mid-’90s, Green Day is still, against the odds, very much “around.”
And when they performed “Basket Case” near the end of their SiriusXM concert — airing Saturday at 9 p.m. ET on their own damn Green Day Radio channel — for an exclusive audience at New York’s Irving Plaza on Thursday night, it was as if they were all 51 going on 21 again.
Taking place 30 years after Green Day first played the Manhattan club — before they hit their usual stadiums on tour this summer — the pogo-propelling party was ostensibly an album-release show a couple hours before “Saviors,” their 14th studio LP, was released on Friday.
And it says a lot about their follow-up to 2020’s lukewarmly received “Father of All Motherf – – kers” that new tracks such as “Look Ma, No Brains,” “Dilemma” and “One Eyed Bastard” — killer singles all — were not just pee-break filler until you could get to forever faves such as “American Idiot,” “Holiday” and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.”
You could just feel that Green Day knew it had some good stuff on what is easily the band’s best album since 2009’s chart-topping, Grammy-winning “21st Century Breakdown.” They tore into the new tunes with the swag, stomp and perfected snarl of the Rock & Roll Hall of Famers that they are.
The new LP reunites the trio with producer Rob Cavallo, who also helmed “Dookie” 1995’s “Insomniac” and 1997’s “Nimrod,” which spawned their biggest hit in “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).”
And it was Cavallo who was behind the boards for 2004’s “American Idiot” — perhaps Green Day’s greatest triumph. Not only did that ambitious concept album score them their first No. 1 LP on the Billboard 200, but it inspired a freaking Broadway musical in 2010.
Now ain’t that some dookie.
And as we launch into a presidential election year fraught with foreboding, Green Day nails the spiked uncertainty on “The American Dream Is Killing Me,” the politically charged opener of “Saviors.”
But perhaps the album’s biggest statement comes in the punk-pop perfection of “Bobby Sox,” on which the bisexual Armstrong casually shifts from “Do you wanna be my girlfriend?” to “Do you wanna be my boyfriend?” in a way that would have been hard to imagine 30 years ago.
As if Green Day needed to do any more to save rock ’n’ roll — just when it needed it — on “Saviors,” they went ahead and made queer punks cool.
