Last month I spent some time listening to new GREEN DAY songs. I concluded my overblown analysis of those tracks by saying, “Listening to these first three tracks off Saviors I am struck by how smooth they are, even in their rowdiest moments, as if they’re trying to fend off any thoughts or feelings about them that might get attached.” I knew I would invariably return to Saviors upon release, so I took it upon myself to do a little palate-cleanse: three albums from three pop-punk bands from three different generations of the genre – Dear You, by JAWBREAKER, Situationist Comedy, by DILLINGER FOUR, and M.I., by MASKED INTRUDER. I wanted to be sure, when I dived headfirst into GREEN DAY’s fourteenth studio album since 1990’s 38/Smooth, I had grounding points to regain context against—all so that recency bias couldn’t just get my ass.
Because the thing is, GREEN DAY’s 2020 album, Father of All Motherfuckers, was shit. It was terrible. The marketing around it was horrendous. It cast the band in a fully out-of-touch Rawk Star light. It would be so easy to listen to Saviors and simply throw it out there that “this is GREEN DAY’s best album since American Idiot” and be done with it. Recapitulate to mass media. Accept GREEN DAY as the Face of Pop-Punk. And I just can’t do it, man. You like political music? Check out “File Under ‘Adult Urban Contemporary.’” You want complex-if-tongue-in-cheek songs delving into the songwriter’s condition? “Lurker II: Dark Son of Night.” You need the sappiest fucking love song you’ve ever heard in your God Damn Life? “I Don’t Wanna Be Alone Tonight” or “Unrequited Love!” And these are just from the three albums I chose at random. All better than anything GREEN DAY has put out in well over a decade.
But still, we have to reckon with Saviors. If not us, who? I mean, fucking Pitchfork got gutted yesterday and sent up-river to goddamn Gentleman’s Quarterly for some dumb reason. Somebody has to be pretentious about an inoffensive pop-rock album that would have done gangbusters at Walmart a decade ago.
So let’s start with this: Saviors is the Warning of the post-American Idiot era of GREEN DAY’s discography*.
Even though the band has left the rock opera gimmick behind, Saviors can still be said to have roughly three “acts” across 15 songs. The first group of songs range from mid-tempo head-bobbers like “The American Dream Is Killing Me” to the exceptional high-speed banger “Look Ma No Brains.” I could do without “One-Eyed Bastard” entirely—an out-of-place machismo magnet bookended by a song where Billie Joe Armstrong asks the audience meekly if they’ll be his girlfriend/boyfriend, and one where he describes in painful detail his struggles with addiction. This mix of slower and faster songs contributes to an overall mellower vibe across the whole album – or maybe subdued is a better descriptor. Understated. The bombast is kept to a minimum.
The second “act” starts off with maybe my favorite song on the album, “1981.” There is a degree to which this sounds like a much more cleanly produced TEENAGE BOTTLEROCKET song – though I don’t think the latter band would enjoy that comparison at this point. Still, it’s undeniably pop-punk. This is the Establishing Song, in my opinion. The song on the album that really definitively says “We Are So Back.” It’s undercut somewhat by “Goodnight Adeline,” an alt-rock ballad that, not for the first time on the album, evokes memories of Blue Album WEEZER. “Coma City” returns to pop-punk with a hint of stadium rock before roller-coasting straight into “Corvette Summer,” a song that sounds like it was written for the Jack Black-Joan Cusack vehicle School of Rock (derogatory). The last song in the “act,” “Suzie Chapstick,” evokes a much, much older era of rock music that I enjoyed a lot more than I thought I would (though, again, WEEZER makes an appearance here in a big way too).
The last five songs on this album wind us down and out of the orbit of Billie Joe Armstrong and associates. “Strange Days Are Here to Stay” and “Living in the ’20s” are a fitting pair to go together, with the former being a statement of resigned bewilderment at the state of the world and the latter apparently being an ironic, sneering sendup of the King Soopers mass shooting in Boulder, CO. “Father to a Son” is a saccharine ballad in the vein of “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” and “Wake Me Up When September Ends.” “Saviors” strangely evokes “Sweet Child of Mine,” and “Fancy Sauce” is the last call at the bar, a slow, drunken existentialist ramble—”We all die young someday,” I guess. Some parting words.
If there’s a trick to this GREEN DAY album it’s that they’ve almost convinced me that they’ve learned humility from a decade and a half of apparently falling out of favor of the broader pop music scene. They’re the old guys now, the washed up scene grandpas relegated to playing dive bars and California backyards as opposed to the massive concert venues and stadiums they used to sell out. If Father of all Motherfuckers was the band’s petulant refusal to be anything but Rawk Stars, Saviors is their clearheaded response to the subsequent repudiation. It helps that it actually sounds like the band enjoys playing music again. Maybe it’s the production (Rob Cavallo and Chris Lord-Alge both returning after a decade), maybe it’s the fact that Armstrong isn’t putting as goofy of an affect on his voice, maybe it’s the fact that these songs sound less like the band ripping off lesser-known acts and more like actual homage, but the tracks on Saviors all at least sound vital, like they come from a genuine place, as opposed to being a label obligation or a puff project.
Of course, it is still all artifice, like the quintessential WWE/AEW superstar who can convincingly sell their underdog face status because they really did live in their car and eat cans of beans raw for a while in their indie come-up. GREEN DAY ain’t playing no fuckin basement or backyard shows, lmao. They’ve got a stadium tour of the Imperial Core coming up this spring and summer, co-headlining with other 90s alt-rock radio stars like SMASHING PUMPKINS and RANCID, promoted by TICKETMASTER. But to some degree that’s the true essence of 90s alt-rock anyway: the last gasp of a music-industrial house of cards propped up by stupid-rich record and radio executives who hadn’t yet sniffed the first wave of mass media consolidation coming with the advent of the Internet. Maybe that’s why it’s so fascinating to hear these Old Guys constantly try to make a comeback: the same shitheads who made their careers also broke music so badly that they can never truly return once they’ve fallen off the radar.
Make no mistake: I like this album, surprisingly. GREEN DAY is a band that spent fifteen fucking years utterly steeped in the excess of “ROCK MUSIC,” and for once I find myself enjoying the fact that they are (mostly) unpretentiously going “back to basics,” as cliched as that sounds. I like the fact that they wear their influences, old and new, on their sleeve – that they actually have new influences at all. Contra what I wrote in my last post, I don’t think Saviors is totally boring and derivative. But I still get the feeling while listening to the album that I’d on balance rather listen to the bands and albums that influenced it. Hearing songs like “1981” and “Coma City” simply reminds me that there’s an entire TEENAGE BOTTLEROCKET album from 2021 that I just… fully slept on, for example.
Admittedly, I could be having a worse time.