Green Day - Revolution Radio review: 'A healthy dose of middle-aged self-awareness'

It's been four years since the last Green Day album — or rather albums (the dreary trilogy ¡Uno!, ¡Dos! and ¡Tré!) — heralded the California punk trio’s longest pause since they formed in 1986.

Following burnout, breakdown and Broadway — frontman Billie Joe Armstrong has pitched up in their musical American Idiot — they’ve remembered what made them form a band in the first place.

There’s no overreaching concept to Revolution Radio, just a bunch of melodic punk tunes that hark back to their 1994 megasmash Dookie (and further back to The Clash) with a healthy dose of middle-aged self-awareness.

“I was a high school atom bomb/Going off on the weekends/Smoking dope and mowing lawns/And I hated all the new trends,” sings the now sober Armstrong on Too Dumb to Die.

The songs are well pitched between fury and introspection — and as ever, the abrupt shifts from acoustic plucking to crunching power chords are no less enjoyable for being entirely predictable.

(Reprise)

Follow @StandardEnts or like us on Facebook for more entertainment news.