Green Day Swings for the Fences on "21st Century Breakdown"

Green Day
21st Century Breakdown May

Green Day may have needed every minute of the five years since its last album to craft a suitable follow-up.

"American Idiot marked a really high bar for us," says Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong. "It's easy to go, 'OK, we can just write a collection of songs.' But there was something about trying to keep going for it."

Created over the past three years, 21st Century Breakdown veers from hard-charging garage rockers to oversize Queen-style grandeur. Chronicling the life of a young couple as they deal with the mess our 43rd president left behind, the punk opera is divided into three acts: "Heroes and Cons," "Charlatans and Saints" and "Horseshoes and Hand Grenades."

If the structure itself seems ambitious, it pales next to the band's plans to perform all three acts in the entirety on a world tour expected to kick off in July. "We've done the first act and half of the second. Then we look at each other and go, 'This is really hard,'" Armstrong says. "It's funny — we make our most physical album not when we're 19 but in our mid-30s."

While the band returns to the political and personal themes of Idiot as well as that album's sprawling arrangements, the punch is vintage Green Day: three-chords of fire driven by a concussive beat. As we reported in our first listen last month , the result is urgent, soaring and powerful.

"They were swinging wildly for the stars on this one," says producer Butch Vig.

Says Armstrong, "The challenge is to do something that sounds sophisticated but also sounds like you did it all in one breath."