It’s been a tumultuous few years for Green Day. In 2012, the band released a trio of albums, ¡Uno!, ¡Dos!, and ¡Tré!, which yielded wildly mixed results. Following that, guitarist-vocalist Billie Joe Armstrong would enter rehab for his addiction to prescription pills, and the band’s newly christened fourth member, guitarist Jason White, would begin a fight with cancer. Since then, though, things have been on the upswing. With Armstrong sober and White cancer-free, the band would celebrate its induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2015, and also get the chance to return to 924 Gilman Street, the punk club where it cut its teeth (and had been banned from for over 20 years). Keeping that momentum going, on October 7 the band will release Revolution Radio, its first album in four years and seemingly its most concise since 2000’s Warning—eschewing the trend of rock operas and multi-album projects they’ve released over the last decade.
Along with the announcement of Revolution Radio the band released “Bang Bang,” a song that retains the politically-minded subject matter of the band’s pair of 2000s albums—American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown—but recalls the propulsive pop-punk of Green Day’s mid-’90s era. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Armstrong notes that ”Bang Bang” is inspired by “the culture of mass shooting that happens in America,” and the album’s genesis was sparked by his partaking in a protest following the killing of Michael Brown.
Revolution Radio is available for pre-order now, and “Bang Bang” can be streamed on Spotify or viewed as a lyric video on the band’s Facebook page.