Were anyone in denial that this would be an election year ruled by conflict and nonsense, a wake-up call came in the form of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest. Performing on the variety show, the rock band Green Day changed one line from their 2004 song “American Idiot”: “I’m not a part of a redneck agenda” became “I’m not part of the MAGA agenda.” Thus was born the first culture skirmish of 2024.

Social media lit up with salutes from the left and complaints from the right. Elon Musk tweeted, “Green Day goes from raging against the machine to milquetoastedly raging for it.” Fox News then devoted multiple segments to repeating such sentiments. “I just never thought that I’d see a band that’s supposed to be, you know, against everything, raging for the machine,” one on-air commentator said. “Keep on raging for the machine, fellas!”

The dustup was perplexing, and not just because Green Day and Rage Against the Machine are totally different bands. “American Idiot” is a protest track inspired by George W. Bush, and the band’s front man, Billie Joe Armstrong, has been reworking it to refer to Donald Trump in performances since 2016. But this particular pronouncement caught some people off guard. Which makes some sense: After presidential politics and popular culture seemed to fuse into one spectacle under the Trump administration, the Biden years have seen mainstream entertainers—and audiences—tune out of partisan topics a bit. Now here was Green Day, forcing network-TV viewers to confront the tensions of 2016 and 2020 again.

As the band sees it, making statements is just part of their job. “I would prefer to not have to deal with politics in life, but I’m an adult, and I know that there are things that can only change with speaking out or lashing out,” Tré Cool, the band’s drummer, told me when I met with the group last week. Armstrong seemed particularly baffled by the blowback. “Someone was pearl-clutching on Fox News, and they were like, Why can’t you just shut up and sing?” he said. “And I’m like, Well, I did sing!”

When I mentioned that the Fox commentator Greg Gutfeld had argued that the true punks these days were folks such as Musk and the conspiracist-friendly podcaster Joe Rogan, not Green Day, Armstrong let out an unhappy laugh. “It seems backwards to me,” he said. “Elon Musk owns Twitter and he just pushes his agenda to make money … That sounds like a puppet master more than it does a punk. And then, I mean, I don’t listen to Joe Rogan. To me, Joe Rogan just seems like a jock.”

The kerfuffle is a sign of why this trio remains one of the most important rock acts of the past three decades. Green Day emerged from an insular California punk scene in the early 1990s with jams so energetic and catchy that even Middle America couldn’t resist. The band was led by a Bay Area bisexual who, as one 2000 hit put it, wanted “to be the minority,” but most of their songs were about topics the majority could relate to: sitting around, watching TV, feeling bored and alienated.

Boredom and alienation, of course, are part of our national dysfunction: People tend to go down extremist rabbit holes when they find more fulfillment in their screens than in the real world. This year will offer a few reminders that Green Day has, in a way, been charting our festering national burnout for decades. Dookie, the band’s scrappy breakout release, is turning 30. American Idiot, their political epic, will be 20. This past Friday saw the release of the group’s new album, Saviors, a tight, upbeat collection of songs about the chaos of the 2020s. Considered together, these albums make clear which machines Green Day have actually been raging against: the ones that turn our brains into stew.

The three members of Green Day are each 51 years old, and they still style themselves as poster-ready rockers. When I met them at a New York City hotel, the bassist Mike Dirnt sported spiky, peroxide-blond hair and a striped blazer. Cool wore a leather-looking jacket and plaid pants. The still-baby-faced Armstrong made the punkest fashion choice of all: He remained hunched in a heavy winter coat, which dwarfed him like a suit of armor, for the duration of our talk.

A particular song from Saviors had been in my head that day: “1981,” a Billy Idol–indebted track inspired by the year when MTV made its debut. Back in ’81, the band members were turning 9 years old and growing up in small-town California. MTV was “the most exciting thing” on TV, Dirnt said, unless you could hack your cable box to pick up HBO or the Playboy network. The song is palpably nostalgic for that era—but it’s also about the dawn of the era we’re still in. “Channel surfing,” Armstrong said, has just accelerated into “channel swiping” on one’s phone.

He mentioned a recent experience browsing Instagram Reels. With one swipe, he was shown a video about Gaza; the next, he was shown an old lady trying to dance while undergoing a bout of flatulence. The contrast haunted him as a sign of “the weird time that we live in,” Armstrong said. “Whether it’s war or farts, you never know what you’re going to get.”

Saviors is all about such modern juxtapositions. The sound is candied and crunchy, recalling punk rock less than the Beatles, the Cars, and Weezer. Though some songs are about addiction or love, many tracks have self-explanatory titles—“Living in the ’20s,” “Strange Days Are Here to Stay”—and keyword-soup lyrics mentioning fentanyl, TikTok, and Uber drivers who show up late. Conspiracy-theory mindsets are repeatedly lampooned. The lyrics hardly add up to a coherent or point of view, but the confusion they summon seems to be connecting with listeners: The lead single, “The American Dream Is Killing Me,” is surely the first Billboard Rock Airplay No. 1 hit to contain the phrase “we’re pedophiles” (for the American dream, to be clear—again, not that that makes a ton of sense).

The band learned long ago that topicality and popularity were compatible. On American Idiot, the trio took aim at the with-us-or-against-us nationalism that buoyed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The album generated some of the most beloved rock hits of the 21st century (“Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” “American Idiot,” “Holiday”), and the band believes that its messages ended a “period of silence,” as Cool put it. In the early days of the Bush administration, scattered musicians had issued protest songs. But after the country-pop group the Chicks were blacklisted from many radio stations for criticizing the president in 2003, “people were really afraid to say anything” critical of America during wartime, Cool said. “We came out with this record, and I think it was like a breath of fresh air for a lot of artists.”

Saviors isn’t as pointedly polemical—or musically ambitious—as Idiot, but it is definitely about American idiocy. The zippy “Look Ma, No Brains!” opens with the lines “Don’t know much about history / ‘Cause I never learned how to read” and just gets more proudly knuckleheaded from there. The song is in part about how in the social-media era, “everybody’s doing stupid shit to get 15 seconds of fame,” Dirnt said, “and sometimes it’s really fucking funny.”

Armstrong, a high-school dropout, is also singing about his own insecurities on their goofier tracks. “There’s a vulnerability” to his many songs over the years about feeling like a fool or loser, he said. Our political divides, he added, stem in part from “people that never grew out of high school,” fixating on the same resentments that pit jocks against oddballs. In an economy where so many people are stymied from living the life they always dreamed for themselves, “there’s something about elitism that people get pissed off about,” Armstrong said.

At small show at Irving Plaza in Manhattan on the night before Savior’s release, Armstrong made a brief reference to the band’s recent headlines—“the last thing we need is for fuckin’ Elon Musk to be bitchin’ about anything,” he said, after asking people to put away their cellphones. But the tone of the show was less bitter protest than victory lap; the band was playing a shorter version of the set list they’ll bring on tour later this year when they plan to perform Dookie and American Idiot in their entirety. The Saviors lyrics about ennui and apocalypse fit well alongside the older material they played, including the slacker confession of Dookie’s “Longview” and the turn-off-your-brain-and-cheer-for-facism satire of American Idiot’s “Holiday.” Amid all the verses about malaise and anxiety, the music’s galloping, enlivening quality made its own statement.