10 Best Rock Comeback Albums

The fact that bands can even make a genre defining record is a miracle on its own. When you have something that's touches that many people though, you're going to have to live in the shadow of it for the rest of your days. Hell, even when you try to reinvent the wheel again, you're not safe from people trying to steal your tapes.

Around the time that Green Day were getting ready to make a return to roots record with Cigarettes and Valentines, all of the master tapes were stolen from their studio, leaving them back at square one again. Instead of just playing the same songs over again, producer Rob Cavallo encouraged them to dig down deep inside themselves to create something better.

Taking inspiration from the Iraq war that was about to kick into high gear, Billie Joe Armstrong crafted American Idiot into a scathing rock opera about the youth of America looking for something better than what they'd been given.

Compared to the rest of the pop punk scene at the time, this was now the new benchmark for how every band could grow up, taking the building blocks of classic rock and injecting them with a whole lot more attitude.

Green Day may have been considered fossils of the rock scene at this point, but acts like Fall Out Boy and Blink 182 only wished they could write a record like this.