Cover Story: Inside the Recording of Green Day’s ‘Saviors’

“Scrappy” isn’t a word typically used to describe stadium bands 30 years into their career, but that’s exactly what Green Day is on its most recent album, 2024’s Saviors. Playing with a true hunger—like a band that’s sold 75 records instead of 75 million—the vibe is familiar but fresh as frontman/songwriter Billie Joe Armstrong wrestles with modern life and its ugly side effects, all the while backed by performances that bring the rock, dump it on your lawn, and head back to the quarry for more.

While Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tré Cool got their strongest reviews in years with Saviors, even more kudos came their way in November when they earned their first Grammy Award nominations in more than a decade. That kind of acclaim caught the veteran band by surprise. “I didn’t really know what to expect at this point,” Armstrong admits. “It seemed like it just resonated with people.”

Saviors may be a return to form, but it also marked the return of key collaborators from the band’s past, most notably producer Rob Cavallo, who worked with the group on some of its best-known albums, including the 1994 breakthrough Dookie and 2004’s landmark song cycle, American Idiot. Also returning were Green Day’s longtime recording engineer Chris Dugan; mastering engineer Ted Jensen; and mix engineer Chris Lord-Alge, who tackled the album—his seventh for the band—in his SoCal facility, Mix L.A.

If Armstrong was caught off-guard by the album’s critical success, Lord-Alge was not. “Saviors is the Dookie bus and the American Idiot bus crashing through each other,” he says with a laugh. “It gives you the intelligence of Idiot with the raw riffs of Dookie—and Nimrod, because let’s not discount Nimrod.”

Saviors had its genesis far from Los Angeles, however, as Armstrong first began working on the album in England as the group’s 2021-22 Hella Mega world tour—postponed from its originally planned 2020 run—wrapped up.

“We started at RAK Studios in London right around Halloween,” says Armstrong. “I was staying at a place close by, and I would walk through Regent’s Park every day to go to the studio. Some of my favorite music of all time has come out of England—The Kinks, The Beatles, Buzzcocks, Generation X, bands like The Libertines—so writing songs that were about a post-mortem America while being in a different country just felt right.”

Certainly, the America of Saviors isn’t an easy place to be. “Susie Chapstick” explores social media’s chilling effect on friendships, while “1981” draws upon the specter of the Cold War and the self-lacerating “Dilemma” contrasts a happily chugging riff against Armstrong’s battles with his personal demons.

“People want to know what the songs are about, but I look at what is every line about,” says Armstrong. “With a song like ‘The American Dream Is Killing Me,’ I address things like homelessness and QAnon and everything that’s under the umbrella of what the American Dream is supposed to be—and how it just doesn’t work and it’s a broken country right now. Same with ‘Coma City,’ where it says, ‘Mask on your Face / Bankrupt the planet for assholes in space.’ I’m covering a lot of ground in two lines. It’s not like songs have to specifically be about one thing; I think they can be about multiple things in the verses.”

The band’s long history with Cavallo informed the writing process as well. “I have such a strong relationship with Rob,” says Armstrong. “Rob is good with ‘try this chord’ or being a good cheerleader, but I think most importantly, it’s the depth of conversation that we can have about the music and what the lyrics are about. For instance, with the song ‘Bobby Sox,’ there is a bisexual something that is ambiguous about that song—and we got into the guts of it. I said, ‘I could really hear a girl singing on this song,’ and he was ‘Well, that would change it completely.’ And I realized, ‘Well, technically, I am the girl in the song in the second verse,’ and he’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ Those are really important conversations to have when you’re making music that matters.”

Recording that music took the better part of a year with sessions held at RAK as well as Los Angeles’ United Recording and Henson Recording Studios. Periodically, Lord-Alge got songs to mix in small batches, each time finding all the stakeholders pleased with the results, but also determined to return to the studio.

“The thing that makes Saviors so good is that they were ahead of the game,” says Lord-Alge. “Remember, COVID changed all the touring schedules, and it gave them a nice buffer. We were sitting in the mix room and Rob’s like, ‘I think we need some more songs.’ Even I said to Rob, ‘You have time; why don’t you guys keep cutting?’ That’s where ‘American Dream’ came from.”

The caustic “The American Dream Is Killing Me” may have been the opening track and first single, but the anthem nearly wasn’t recorded, having initially been written and then set aside during sessions for the band’s previous album, 2020’s Father of All….

“We were going for something completely different then,” says Armstrong. “I didn’t want to be political; that wasn’t really the message we were trying to do. We were wanting to do something more garage rock back then—but as time went on, it just seemed like ‘American Dream’ was fitting in with the new album perfectly.” Now Armstrong sees that song and the album’s title track, written during the darkest days of the pandemic, as “two sides of the same coin, or two sides of the same single. It felt perfect and when I played the demo for Rob, he was like, ‘Man, we should really record this.’”

After 14 albums, the band’s recording process is well-honed, with Armstrong writing on his own before presenting demos to the band. In the past, he’s had well-appointed home studios that could put some commercial facilities to shame, but these days, he takes a less complicated approach, opting for a desktop UA Apollo interface, Kemper amp modeler, electronic drum kit and computer.

“I love to do demos in Pro Tools, but I keep it super simple; I don’t want to get into geeking out or I’ll just get lost,” he says with a grin. “I play the demo for Mike and Tré and we’ll get in the studio and start to mess with it—like, ‘Well, the song’s a minute and a half long, so we probably should make it another minute and a half long!’ We’ll work with the bridge or an instrumental part like that outro to ‘Coma City,’ which is something where we were ‘Let’s just burn till the end.’

“We get the perfect drum track from Tré—he analyzes everything that he does and he’s such a professional when it comes to that,” says Armstrong. “Then Mike will overdub bass; he’s very particular about the kind of bass lines that he wants, and he’ll do them a couple of different ways. I’ll put my guitars on, put a solo on, do vocals mostly by myself and then Mike will put his backup vocals on it. 90% of the time, we know what each song is gonna be, but it’s about making sure that we’re done before sending it to Chris Lord-Alge.”

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For the veteran engineer, mixing the album was a joy because of the material: “With ‘American Dream,’ the way the riff was so anthemic, it was like, ‘Okay, that is so Green Day!’ It was like ‘Holiday’ and ‘American Idiot’ rolled into one because, let’s be honest, the thing that they’re really good at is playing Green Day songs.”

And there are two secrets to ensuring they sound like Green Day songs, says Lord-Alge, the first of which is to keep everything as analog as possible. “You can’t mix a Green Day record in a box—it ain’t gonna happen,” he says, sitting next to his SSL 4000 E/G desk. “The sound of that record is going through the analog gear—through the console, through the Pultecs, through the compressors. The more analog gear used, the more it sounds like Green Day; the less you use, it doesn’t sound like ’em.”

The second secret, he says, is to zero in on Mike Dirnt’s bass lines: “Once I get what I feel is Tré’s drum sound, the vocals and guitars are easy, and the bass becomes the focus. It’s not because Mike’s the bass player and wants to hear his part; no, he doesn’t care. He finds these parts that glue it together—and if you don’t hear them, it doesn’t sound like Green Day. The bass has to be as loud as the guitars so you can hear all the melodies. Mike plays these inner, little passing parts, and once those are upright, then that melodic structure of the band comes together.”

With extra time to refine the album, the bandmembers were able to live with the mixes for a while instead of making split-second decisions. That had its pros and cons, says Lord-Alge: “Look, I like deadlines. You know what happens with deadlines? Shit gets done. On the other hand, when you don’t have one, a mix can sit around and you can revisit it, so we were able to fine-tune stuff that they were unsure about and add or change parts.”

Armstrong agrees, recalling, “Every once in a while, we’ll go, ‘Oh, we’re missing this one thing’ while we’re mixing, and I’ve pulled out a guitar in Chris Lord-Alge’s place and just played it there on the spot.”

Ultimately, says Lord-Alge, “Nothing is ‘done’ unless all three are here and they sign off—and that’s fine. My attitude is, ‘It’s not done until you say we’ve got to send it to Ted Jensen for mastering.’”

That attention to detail is telling, too. “What separates Green Day from other bands,” says the engineer, “is the fact that they actually care about how their record sounds and they put a lot of effort into it; they don’t just sit on their laurels. We don’t have bands like that anymore; we do not have another Green Day, another Rolling Stones or The Beatles.”

That fact is likely not lost on the band either. The title track on Saviors shows up late in the album—song number 14—finding Armstrong in full-on power-pop mode, searching for hope in a downtrodden world as he sings, “We are the last of the rockers.” Asked if that’s really the case, he pauses, perhaps thinking of recent Grammy nominations, stadiums of screaming fans, the band’s stumbles and successes or a thousand other milestones over the last 30 years, before eventually replying thoughtfully, “I think that we are the survivors of the rockers—that’s for sure.”