Saviors (album)

Saviors is the fourteenth studio album by the American rock band Green Day, released on January 19, 2024, through Reprise Records. It received generally positive reviews from critics.

Background and promotion
In an interview with KROQ, Billie Joe Armstrong stated that seven songs had not made it to their last album, Father of All Motherfuckers (2020), which was met with mixed reviews. Butch Walker, who early reports indicated would also produce the band's next project, had been heavily criticized for his work on the last album. Eventually, long time friend of the band, Rob Cavallo, stepped up for the job. Cavallo had worked with them on previous albums, including Dookie (1994), and American Idiot (2004), although they had not worked together for almost 10 years, by 2022, since the release of ¡Tré! (2012).

In February 2021, one year after the previous album's release, "Here Comes the Shock", produced by Walker, debuted as part of the band's two-year deal with the NHL. Another standalone song, "Pollyanna", self-produced by the band, was released in May 2021, to celebrate the Hella Mega Tour, which had been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In November 2021, the band released another song, titled "Holy Toledo!", which was also produced by Walker, and was used in the soundtrack of the 2021 film Mark, Mary & Some Other People.

Saviors was recorded in London, England, and Los Angeles, California. Early reports claimed that their forthcoming record would be titled 1972, signifying the year all three members were born. The band would post teasers in social media, pointing that the album's name would in fact be that. The first of them dates back to December 2021, more than two years before the album was eventually released, now named Saviors.

In May 2023, the demo of "One Eyed Bastard" was leaked. Prior to the album's release, the band played "1981" during their live performance at Festival d'été de Québec on July 16, 2023. The band announced the album on October 24, 2023, and released its lead single "The American Dream Is Killing Me" alongside its music video. While it was the first track written for the album, it was kept in a box for a while, according to Billie Joe Armstrong, who revealed that once they recorded it, they immediately decided to release the song as the lead single. The track constitutes "a look at the way the traditional American Dream doesn't work for a lot of people" but hurts them instead. Until its release the band would post clips of the music video and snippets of the lyrics in the single's promo website (www.theamericandreamiskillingme.com). The song was played live for the first time, along with another song from the album titled "Look Ma, No Brains!" at the When We Were Young festival in Las Vegas, Nevada. On November 4, 2023, the band played "1981" again during a live show at the Bataclan in Paris, France.

On the same day, the track list was leaked on Banquet Records, a UK record store, before later being confirmed by Warner Music's site. The length of the songs on the tracklist was leaked by a French music store called Qobuz. The second single, "Look Ma, No Brains!", was released on November 2, 2023. Armstrong stated in an interview with Amazon Prime, that it was his favorite track off the album and one of the greatest punk songs he'd ever written. One month later, on December 4, 2023, the band announced "Dilemma" as the album's third single. It came out on December 7, 2023, along with a Christmas themed music video. On New Year's Eve, Green Day performed the song live for the first time on the television special Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve. They also performed "American Idiot", where Armstrong replaced the line "I'm not a part of a redneck agenda" with "I'm not a part of the MAGA agenda", a reference to Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan, in criticism of the former US president.

The album's fourth single, "One Eyed Bastard", that had previously leaked, was released on January 5, 2024, along with a lyric video. On the evening of January 16, 2024, the band appeared in a surprise performance in the 47th–50th Streets–Rockefeller Center station of the New York subway system, with late-night host Jimmy Fallon joining them on tambourine to help draw attention to the upcoming album and tour, and played several songs including the recent single "Look Ma, No Brains!", "Basket Case", and "American Idiot"—this time, Armstrong leaving space to let the subway crowd sing out the song's revised line "I'm not a part of the MAGA agenda". The album, along with a music video for "Bobby Sox", came out on January 19, 2024. A music video for "Corvette Summer" is set to release on July 23, 2024.

On January 13, 2024, six days before the album released, the band held listening parties for the album in various indie record stores across the world.

Green Day are currently between legs of the Saviors Tour through North America and Europe. Nothing but Thieves, The Hives, The Interrupters, Donots and Maid of Ace were announced as openers on the European leg starting in May 2024, while the Smashing Pumpkins, Rancid, and The Linda Lindas will serve the same role on the North American leg of the tour beginning in July 2024. The band will perform their albums Dookie and American Idiot in their entirety, celebrating their 30th and 20th anniversaries, respectively.

Cover art
The album cover is an edited version of a photo taken in 1978 by Chris Steele-Perkins at a riot during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It depicts a youth named Paul Kennedy, holding a stone and shrugging, on the Falls Road, Belfast in front of a moving car with a burning garbage pile in the background. In the final version, the young man's face was changed to that of a boy named Ivan Fraser, and altered to have a more smiling look.

Critical reception
Saviors received a score of 73 out of 100 on review aggregator Metacritic based on 21 critics' reviews, indicating "generally favorable" reception. DIY's Emma Swann called the album "an outstanding record that showcases that same still unrivalled ability to incorporate biting social commentary within perfect, three-minute pop (punk) songs." NME's Andrew Trendell called it Green Day's best album since American Idiot as well as "an act of defiance met with a shrug; a band saying, 'We're still here and we're still fucked'". Uncut wrote that the band "unleash 15 compact, primarily pro forma bangers". Reviewing the album for AllMusic, senior editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine noted that "Green Day sound exactly like what they are: rock & roll lifers settling into middle age, irritated by some shifts in culture but still finding sustenance in the music they've loved for decades." and concluded that, "Age may dampen Green Day's roar, but it has also heightened their songcraft, and that's reason enough to give Saviors time to let its hooks sink in. "

Commercial performance
Saviors debuted at number four on the Billboard 200 with 49,000 album-equivalent units including 39,000 pure album sales, 9,500 streaming equivalent units and 500 track equivalent albums. An additional 7,000 traditional albums (CD, vinyl, cassette and digital downloads) were sold in the second week, 6,000 copies were sold in the third week. In its first week, 10,390 copies of the album were sold through independent record stores. These sales were not included in the Billboard 200. As of April 2024, the album has sold 108,000 album-equivalent units in the United States.

The album debuted at number one in the UK with 31,361 album-equivalent units, including 1,493 units from digital downloads, 3,369 from sales-equivalent streams.

Personnel
Green Day
 * Billie Joe Armstrong – lead vocals, guitars, production
 * Mike Dirnt – bass guitar, backing vocals, production
 * Tré Cool – drums, percussion, production

Additional musicians
 * Rob Cavallo – additional guitar (on "Suzie Chapstick" and "Saviors"), additional piano (on "Suzie Chapstick"), horns arrangement, string arrangements (on "The American Dream Is Killing Me")
 * Butch Walker – acoustic guitar (on "Goodnight Adeline")
 * David Campbell – string arrangements (on "The American Dream Is Killing Me" and "Father to a Son")

Production
 * Rob Cavallo – producer (all tracks)
 * Chris Lord-Alge – mixing
 * Ted Jensen – mastering
 * Chris Dugan – engineering, mixing (on "Fever")
 * Greyson Smith – editing
 * Butch Walker – additional engineering (all tracks), producer (on "Fever")
 * Mark Aguilar – additional engineering
 * Brian Judd – mixing assistance
 * Duncan Fuller – engineering assistance
 * Jacob Spitzer – engineering assistance
 * Scott Moore – engineering assistance
 * Bill Schneider – backline technician
 * Nathaniel Mela – drum technician
 * Andrew Hans Buscher – guitar technician

Artwork
 * Chris Steele-Perkins – artwork
 * Emma America – photography
 * Alice Baxley – photography
 * Ryan Baxley – graphic design
 * Brendan Walter – graphic design
 * Alex Tenta – graphic design