10 Rock Bands That Got Better With Age
8. Green Day
No self respecting pop punk band is going to want to grow up any time soon. Half of the reason why this genre works the way it does is because of its connection to the more angsty side of yourself, taking the sounds of traditional punk and making it accessible to the middle school crowd. It was an aesthetic that Green Day practically invented though, so it's no surprise that they were able to reinvent it all over again.
After the blockbuster smash of Dookie set the pop punk sound into motion, the next few years for the band saw them trying to distance themselves from their traditional sounds, using wild experimentation on albums like Nimrod and even delving into the political pool on tracks off of Warning. Though the political side may have been a bit hard for some fans to take in, American Idiot blew everyone's expectations out of the water, framing pop punk music in the form of a rock opera with different storylines about modern day America.
Where most bands would have been laughed out of the room, Billie Joe Armstrong had the tunes to back it up, combining different song fragments into 9 minute exercises without anything feeling boring for a second. The angsty side of themselves may have been fading away, but Green Day learned a valuable lesson when they reached their elder statesmen phase. Once you grow up in the world of punk, you can do whatever the hell you want afterward.