10 Rock Bands With 2 Masterpiece Music Albums

There really wasn't that much of a point thinking that a band like Green Day would be able to go the distance after the late '90s. Even though Dookie may have captured the zeitgeist of kids who wanted something a little bit more approachable than the dirty sounds of grunge, you're only going to write songs like Welcome to Paradise once, and the rest of the pop punk scene felt content with leaving them in the dust. Just when they started to get lapped by bands like Blink-182 and Sum 41 though, Billie Joe Armstrong came through with some of his most pertinent songs yet.

Almost a decade after Dookie's release, American Idiot gave the band's career a second wind, going after the Bush administration for the very questionable practices that led to the Iraq War. While having the title track of this album would have been fine enough on its own, the rest of the album plays out like a rock opera, following a bunch of kids trying to make sense of living in an America that feels more like a dystopia half the time.

For all of the bands that were still singing songs about being young and alone, this was the real gamechanger that made pop punk be taken seriously in the rock scene, with Green Day even writing a follow up opera a few years later with 21st Century Breakdown. Green Day may have grown up in the same underground scenes that birthed bands like Blink-182, but there's a good chance that Tom DeLonge was never going to write anything quite as strong as Jesus of Suburbia.