In 2004 it was impossible to escape American Idiot, Green Day’s rock opera railing against the Iraq war and a sense of growing social dysfunction in the US. Depending on your outlook, the album was either irritatingly gauche in its outlook, or a bracing blast of agit-prop punk at a time when most pop music shrank away from anything vaguely political. Yet in the years that followed, as the Bush administration transitioned to the more measured Obama era, Green Day ballooned into bloated prog excess, with the likes of their OTT album trilogy Uno! Dos! Tre!
Now, though, with Donald Trump inching towards the White House, the band have decided to get back to basics: Revolution Radio is their most focused work in years. Lead single Bang Bang sets the tone, with a caustic consideration of the fame-hungry psychosis of a mass shooter, while Still Breathing pointedly depicts three figures in distress: a dying drug addict, a wounded soldier and a bottomed-out gambler. There’s still a tendency for things to get a little sixth-form common room, particularly in the empty sloganeering of the title track (“legalise the truth”; “anti-social media”), but it’s good to see that there’s life in the old punks yet.
