Green Day Goes for the Grammy Gold

Los Angeles, CA (December 20, 2024)—When Green Day’s Saviors album was released last January, it found the pop-punk pioneers all fired up, with frontman/songwriter Billie Joe Armstrong mad as hell and pointing fingers in every direction, including at himself. While that led to their strongest reviews in years and a current two-year world tour, even more kudos came in November when the group received three Grammy Award nominations. Underscoring the record’s high consistency, the singles “The American Dream Is Killing Me” and “Dilemma” are up for Best Rock Performance and Best Rock Song respectively, while Saviors itself is in the running for Best Rock Album. It’s a particularly satisfying turn of events for a band that, despite packing stadiums around the globe, has never taken success for granted.

“I didn’t know really what to expect at this point, being in a rock band for 30 years,” said Armstrong, discussing Saviors’ reception. “It seemed like it just resonated with people and the experience’s been really positive.”

The album also marked the return of producer Rob Cavallo, who worked with the group on some of its best-known albums, including the 1994 breakthrough Dookie and 2004’s landmark song cycle, American Idiot. Also returning for Saviors were the band’s longtime recording engineer Chris Dugan; mastering engineer Ted Jensen, and go-to mix engineer Chris Lord-Alge, clocking his seventh album mixed for the band.

If Armstrong was modestly surprised by the album’s critical success, Lord-Alge was not. “Saviors is the Dookie bus and the American Idiot bus crashing through each other,” he said with a laugh. “It gives you the intelligence of Idiot with the raw riffs of Dookie—and Nimrod, because let’s not discount Nimrod.”

The Grammy nomination for the opening track and first single, “The American Dream Is Killing Me,” is all the more surprising considering that the anthem nearly wasn’t recorded. It was one of the last songs tracked for Saviors, but was first written and then set aside during sessions for 2020’s Father of All….

“We were going for something completely different then,” said Armstrong. “I didn’t want to be political; that wasn’t really the message we were trying to do. We were wanting to do something more garage rock back then—but as time went on, it just seemed like ‘American Dream’ was fitting in with the new album perfectly.”

Armstrong sees “American Dream” and the title track “Saviors,” written during the darkest early days of the pandemic, as “two sides of the same coin, or two sides of the same single. It felt perfect and when I played the demo for Rob Cavallo, he was like, ‘Man, we should really record this.’”

The recording process was relatively straightforward, capturing the band at London’s RAK Studios, and both United Recording and Henson Recording Studios in Los Angeles. “90% of the time, we know what each song is going to be,” said Armstrong, “but it’s about making sure that it’s done and then sending it to Chris Lord-Alge.”

For Lord-Alge, mixing the album was a joy because of the material. “With ‘American Dream,’ the way the riff was so anthemic, it was like, ‘Okay, that is so Green Day!’ It was like ‘Holiday’ and ‘American Idiot’ rolled into one because, let’s be honest, the thing that they’re really good at is playing Green Day songs.”

And the keys to ensuring they sound like Green Day songs, said Lord-Alge, is to keep everything as analog as possible—an ethos reflected in the band’s live sound for years—and to zero in on Mike Dirnt’s bass lines. “Once I get what I feel is Tré’s drum sound, the vocals and the guitars are easy, and the bass becomes the focus. It’s not because Mike’s the bass player and wants to hear his part; no, he doesn’t care. He finds these parts that glue it together—and if you don’t hear them, it doesn’t sound like Green Day.”

If the album’s riffs are big, the range of topics addressed is even bigger, as Armstrong himself acknowledged: “People want to know what the songs are about, but I look at what is every line about. With a song like ‘The American Dream Is Killing Me,’ I address things like homelessness and QAnon and everything that’s under the umbrella of what the American Dream is supposed to be—and how it just doesn’t work and it’s a broken country right now. Same with the song ‘Coma City,’ where it says, ‘Mask on your Face / Bankrupt the planet for assholes in space.’ I’m covering a lot of ground in two lines. It’s not like all of a sudden a song has to specifically be about one thing; I think songs can be about multiple things in the verses.”

That’s not the case on the self-lacerating “Dilemma,” which contrasts a happily chugging riff against Armstrong’s battles with his personal demons. “That just wrote itself within 10 minutes,” he said. “I had a lot of alcoholic fatigue that was happening in my head—mental health and feeling like it’s ‘life hangs in the balance’—and I think sometimes that makes for really good songs.”

Those songs are getting aired out nightly on the current world tour, which runs through next September. While the concerts find the band playing both Dookie and American Idiot in full, the new songs hold their own next to tracks that fans have known for decades, underlining how the commitment of everyone involved pushed Saviors to its full potential. “With this,” said Armstrong, “it was like everybody was all in.”

For more insight into the creation of Saviors, look for our full-length cover story in the upcoming February issue of Mix.