(Credits: Far Out / Alice Baxley)
Every album experience is necessarily meant to be fun. There are projects that might be a blast from start to finish, but once responsibilities creep in is when bands usually need to hunker down and show the world what they can do. And despite their track record, Green Day did have some experiences where they needed to lick their wounds afterwards.
But by the dawn of the 2000s, the band were already beginning to look like has-beens in the world of punk rock. Anyone who was paying attention knew that they weren’t coming remotely close to drying up, but for the pop-punk crowd that wanted to hear Dookie all over again, it was easier for them to listen to whatever summer jam that Blink-182 was coming out than try and peel back the layers of whatever brilliant song turned up on an album like Warning.
The B-sides album Shenanigans didn’t help win them any favours with the press, but after seeing the fallout of 9/11 and the oncoming Iraq War, American Idiot was the best statement the band could have made. This was Billie Joe Armstrong sticking his neck on the line and writing songs directly aimed at the political administration, and even if you fundamentally disagreed with everything that the frontman had to say, no one could deny that the title track and ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’ were fantastic songs.
The band had created a completely new lane for themselves that turned them into one of the biggest rock bands of the decade, but that invited its own set of problems. Sure, they had made one of the finest records of their career, but how the hell do you top that? Well, in their case, they recharged their batteries with their alter ego band Foxboro Hottubs, but when they left their longtime producer Rob Cavallo for industry legend Butch Vig, they at least had a firm grasp on what the follow-up would be like.
And on 21st Century Breakdown, they come pretty damn close to matching their previous effort. American Idiot will always have the legacy behind it from when it came out, but the next instalment featured the band making their answer to The Who’s Quadrophenia, complete with more nuanced production on songs like ‘Viva La Gloria!’ and the beautiful ‘Restless Heart Syndrome’.
That didn’t mean that they didn’t go through some harsh moments, either, with Armstrong saying right after they completed it, “This is the album that could have killed us. We had set the bar so high with American Idiot. We all became sick as dogs. I was close to being hospitalised but they caught me in time. [But] We had the opportunity to be more creative than ever before because we have a lot more listeners out there.”
While the sessions may have been gruelling for the group to endure at the time, the real exhaustion didn’t really set in until their next outing. As much as their trilogy of albums has some good ideas across their runtime, you can hear them grasping at straws trying to make something work, which usually pales in comparison to how effortless they sounded making their second opera.
21st Century Breakdown is by no means a perfect record and since it stands as the longest Green Day album, it can feel its length in places, but there’s no reason to fault a band for wanting to stretch themselves. It’s definitely an album where people can cherrypick the best songs, but even if it can’t stand next to its predecessor, you have to give them points for swinging for the fences and actually making one of the better albums of their career.
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