Album Review // Green Day // Saviors

Reprise Records

3.5/5 stars

There's a certain stage that legacy acts reach in their career that makes it difficult to succeed, and Green Day has officially reached that stage. Sure, they could tour on 20 years of American Idiot and 30 years of Dookie and make out like bandits, which they are, but one look at their creative direction of the past near-decade shows a band stuck between a rock and a hard place. Go back to basics (2016's Revolution Radio) and face critical accusations of becoming stale, or do what you want creatively (2020's Father of All…) and get swept up in fan backlash.

Just like last year's One More Time by their peers in Blink-182, Saviors seems to straddle that line almost perfectly. A lengthy tracklist packed with relatively short bursts of power-pop, the album borrows the blueprint for 1997's Nimrod but plays more like a career retrospective. There's well-intentioned and questionably executed political discourse ("The American Dream is Killing Me") and Warning-esque doo-wop-adjacent numbers ("Suzie Chapstick"). Sure, you may still have to stomach mentions of "rock and roll" from 50-year-old punk rock vocalists, but on the Weezer-inspired "Bobby Sox" and "Dilemma," the band sounds more energetic than they have in 15 years.