Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’ has hit a major milestone, with the song officially registering one billion streams on Spotify.
The song was the title track of the band’s Grammy-winning seventh album, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. It is Green Day’s second song to join Spotify’s billions club, after ‘Basket Case’.
It only reached Number 61 on the Billboard Hot 100 at the time of its release in 2004, but did hit Number Three in the UK and was later nominated for four Grammys.
It comes ahead of an official re-release of the album, which will include “limited edition super deluxe box sets” on 8LP vinyl and 4CD, as well as Blu-rays, original documentaries and unreleased tracks. The collection is out on October 25 and you can pre-order/pre-save here.
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The band have been releasing some of the packages bonus tracks in recent weeks, including a demo of ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends’ and ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’ and live television versions of several of the album’s tracks.
Green Day have been performing ‘American Idiot’ in its entirety on their 2024 ‘Saviors’ world tour, which is set to conclude its North American leg at the end of this month.
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In a five-star review of the band’s show in Manchester this summer, NME wrote: “By the time we reach ‘American Idiot’, Armstrong has hit red-hot form, and the volume seems to have been cranked up a notch. There’s no room for ‘21 Guns’ on this setlist, but the emotional potency of ‘Boulevard Of Broken Dreams’ feels magnified.”
Green Day’s ‘Saviors’ came out in January and was hailed by NME as their ”best work since ‘American Idiot’ in a four-star review: “There’s also some serendipity in the band hitting the road to celebrate 30 years of ‘Dookie’ and 20 years of ‘American Idiot’ later this summer. Not only does ‘Saviors’ spiritually bridge the gap between the two, but it uses the palette of the best of the band to tell us something else.
“Look to the artwork: ‘Dookie’ was a cheeky carpet-bombing of shit, ‘American Idiot’ was a hand grenade, ‘Saviors’ is an act of defiance met with a shrug; a band saying, ‘We’re still here and we’re still fucked’.”
In other news, Green Day side project Pinhead Gunpowder have returned with their first new music for 16 years in the form of ‘Unt’, the lead single from their forthcoming album of the same name. The album is set to drop on October 18.