10 Greatest Comeback Albums In Rock

One of the biggest challenges that comes with pop punk is having a lot less to say once you grow up. This genre has always been a young man's game, and Green Day were clearly turning into yesterday's news, making more folksy songs on Warning and getting outdone by their proteges at the time like New Found Glory and Blink-182. Any pop punk band might be able to capture lightning in a bottle, but Green Day had other plans once the Bush administration rose to power.

Getting more and more agitated about what he saw on the news everyday, American Idiot is a visceral reaction from Billie Joe Armstrong about what America was coming to. Framed as a rock opera dealing with a teenager trying to find his place in the world, every single one of these songs is about something greater than just pop punk problems, taking aim straight at the political climate on a song like Holiday while also dealing with the destructive side of yourself on tracks like St. Jimmy.

You don't get that kind of anger without having gone through some great pain though, and the band deal with real issues that any teenager will face in their lifetime, like Billie Joe getting intimate about his father's passing on Wake Me Up When September Ends and bringing out the big guns on Jesus of Suburbia, playing out the title character leaving home for good over 9 minutes. They might not have wanted to play second fiddle to the rest of the pop punk community, but American Idiot wasn't made for the Simple Plan fans of the world. This was Green Day staking their claim as rock royalty, and this record took them from bratty punks to the elder statesmen of rock and roll.