Saviors

For the most part, though, Saviors is the sound of reassuring rebellion from the midst of the 21st Century breakdown. [Mar 2024, p.80]

Green Day are admirably assured, honest, and funny on Saviors. [Mar 2024, p.82]

“Saviors,” Green Day’s new album, is a decisive, even overdetermined return to form.

The resulting album, Saviors, is a hugely entertaining return to form, with some of the seminal American rockers' best music in decades.

As they get older and wiser, when they focus their songwriting skills like they do on Saviors, they are as sharp, bright and essential as they’ve ever been. And they still know who they, and you, are.

We’ve been overdue an election-year statement record from the trio, and ‘Saviors’ gives it a good crack. .... Of course, the record is a good romp too.

A return-to-punk that simultaneously honours Green Day's history of arena-friendly alternative rockers, full of adrenaline and feeling. A mere four years after the execrable Father of All Motherfuckers, it may qualify as a minor miracle.

Saviors probably won’t bring in a lot of new fans, but it will attract lapsed devotees from the past 30 years to check out the band again. These songs will also fit snugly at these upcoming marathon concerts, fitting in snugly between the full album performances of Dookie and American Idiot without sending thousands of people scurrying to the beer lines en masse.

Saviors sounds cleaner, stronger, and purposeful, all due to the still-sharp pop instincts of Bille Joe Armstrong. 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.

Had it been trimmed down to ten or eleven tracks, then maybe we’d be talking about one of Green Day’s strongest releases. As it stands, ‘Saviors’ turns out to be a somewhat confident return to form, but one that also fails to build upon the records that inspired it.

At its high points, Saviors is a reminder of why you fell in love with Green Day, a triumphant outing that will surely silence the critics.

Although there are still growing pains after almost 40 years, Green Day are back with a spiky, enthusiastic vengeance. And that's always a good thing.

It’s Armstrong’s alternating earnestness and sarcasm, combined with some typically hummable tunes, that make Saviors something of a return to form for the trio, which drifted a little too far into pop territory on 2020’s Father of All Motherfuckers.

They unleash 15 compact, primarily pro forma bangers. [Feb 2024, p.28]

Saviors doesn't stray too far from what they've done in the past 10-15 years, but it's far more impassioned despite their pairing things down, proof that maintaining an agreeable middle ground with just enough anger suits them best.

Although the likes of the punchy 1981 and the poppier Suzie Chapstick roll back the years, too many of the songs here sound laboured and/or pedestrian, and there’s a real paucity of memorable material.

Tight and heartfelt if ploddingly unoriginal.

Even at its most ambitious, everything is swept up in a blizzard of overcharged guitars and stylised snarling that would have sounded old-fashioned in 1981, let alone 2024.

These songs may diverge from the ones that made Green Day a household name, but three decades later, they continue to strike a balance between teen spirit and maturity.