Not that Green Day ever really change things up too drastically, but Saviors feels intended as a return to form. It’s their first album with longtime producer Rob Cavallo in over a decade, and for the most part, it streamlines their sound and hones in on the kinds of Green Day songs that have always been most popular–looks like they’ve gotten the Hives/Black Keys impressions of 2020’s Father of All Motherfuckers out of their systems. Saviors comes ahead of a stadium tour that will find Green Day playing American Idiot and Dookie in full for their 20th and 30th anniversaries, respectively, and it combines the punchiness of the latter with the stadium-sized pomp of the former, without any of the former’s rock opera inclinations. It is not an album that takes you by surprise or pushes Green Day’s music forward, but it finds Green Day doing a perfectly fine job of sounding like Green Day. (And, on “Bobby Sox,” they also do a pretty good job of sounding like their Hella Mega tourmates Weezer.)
Post-American Idiot Green Day is bound to have some surface-level political sloganeering and Saviors is not immune (“The American Dream Is Killing Me,” “Living in the ’20s”), but at least their hearts are in the right places, and better to piss off Trump supporters even if their songs are barely saying anything. Not that we need to expect profundity from the guy who sang “I’m so damn bored I’m going blind, and I smell like shit” on one of his biggest hits, but if you do have the time to listen to Billie Joe whine, some of the album’s most impacting lyrics come on the song “Dilemma,” where Billie Joe dives into the struggles with alcoholism that he and his peers have suffered from. When Billie Joe shout-sings “I don’t wanna be a dead man walking,” you really believe him.
As heavily as Saviors leans into the pop punk sugar high that Billie Joe, Mike, and Tré were on during their peak years, it does have a few detours. It’s got a couple power ballads (“Goodnight Adeline,” “Father to a Son”), an earworm riff-rocker (“One Eyed Bastard”), and a jangly Beatlesque song called “Suzie Chapstick” that wouldn’t have been totally out of place on Warning. You probably can’t expect them to ever go full Dookie again, but you don’t need them to–they spread their wings on Saviors without sounding bloated.
This isn’t the first time in recent history that a new Green Day album’s been hailed as the “best since American Idiot,” and it remains to be seen if Saviors ends up having more longevity than, say, Revolution Radio. But right now, it’s pretty easy to imagine people shouting along to some of these choruses at a stadium near you this summer, and that’s nothing to scoff at–even if it’s because of how much they sound like they could already be Green Day songs.
