Green Day

At the tail-end of 2004 — following a brief hiatus and some serious soul-searching — Green Day blew past their former glory as snot-nosed pop stars with the landmark American Idiot, a GRAMMY®-winning rock opera that could have been ghostwritten by Pete Townshend and Joe Strummer. And what an erratic rock opera it was: while the title track (the band's first Hot 100 entry since forming in the late '80s) shares the same pogo-punk bent as "Basket Case" and "Welcome to Paradise," "Jesus of Suburbia" strings together enough plot twists and musical movements to become a "Bohemian Rhapsody" for the basement-show set.

Just as surprising are our Next Steps, which push Green Day in directions we couldn't have even imagined in the era of Dookie.

Behind Green Day's sneering 'n' snickering man-child façade are three incredibly talented songwriters — a fact that becomes abundantly clear as the Berkeley boys tear through hasty, horn-stabbed ska ("King for a Day") one second and succumb to swooning string sections ("Macy's Day Parade") the next. As for the two-part track "Are We the Waiting/St. Jimmy," it shifts from shimmering chords and patient, gut punching drums to a breakneck tempo and buried Beach Boy harmonies. Please, check your expectations at the door.

Keep your Doc Martens on, though, because our Deep Cuts drop a handful of classic punk covers in the same playlist as Green Day's frenzied, Ramones-caliber debut, 1039 Smoothed Out Slappy Hours.

Before Dookie happened, Green Day sprinted through Kerplunk and 1039 Smoothed Out Slappy Hours — simple but promising slabs of pop-punk that offered a glimpse of the group's burgeoning sugar-rush sound ("Burnout," "The Grouch"). As for some of Green Day's other influences, Shenanigans offers a number of revealing covers, including the chug-a-lug chords of "Outsider" (the Ramones), the caustic Cali-punk of "I Want to Be On TV" (Fang), and the Kinks' British Invasion standard "Tired of Waiting For You," which seems like a left-field selection until the mandolin outbursts of "Blood, Sex and Booze" one-up it.

The idea of any band garnering GRAMMY® nods and steady sales with a "punk rock opera" (American Idiot, in this case) is absurd enough, but who knew Green Day had it in them? Certainly not anyone who saw their mud-caked Woodstock '94 performance — a bratty, audience-baiting breakthrough that brought new meaning to Dookie and its two underground punk predecessors, but did little to suggest the melancholy ballads ("Good Riddance"), nine-minute suites ("Jesus of Suburbia"), and pendulum grooves (the borderline metal of "Brain Stew") to come. Yet here they are: three West Coast punks well on their way to two decades together, with little signs of slowing down despite the couch-sinking slacker promises of "Longview"…and that stoner-rock name of theirs.