It has been quite the week for Green Day. The band kicked off the year with an appearance on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin Eve, where singer Billie Joe Armstrong angered MAGA supporters by changing a line in “American Idiot” from “I’m not part of a redneck agenda” to “I’m not part of the MAGA agenda.” Naturally, that got folks up in arms and was a talking point on cable news.
This morning (Jan. 5), the band shared the fourth single from their upcoming album, Saviors. Titled “One Eyed Bastard,” the track veers away from the pop-punk sound prevalent on Saviors’ first three singles and instead leans into hard rock.
“’One Eyed Bastard’ started off as just a riff that I had — a shuffle, almost like a Black Sabbath kind of riff. Lyrically, I was just reflecting on bad times in life,” Armstrong says. “That’s the thing about nostalgia, sometimes you think, ‘That was an awful time.’ Everybody’s got that ugly place in their life where they have to deal with ugly thoughts — it could be like revenge or whatever. Thankfully, I have an outlet in songwriting.”
Saviors is Green Day’s first album since 2020s’ Father of All… and is out on Jan. 19. Later this year, the band will be hitting the road for a stadium tour in support of the album and to honor the 30th and 20th anniversaries of Dookie and American Idiot, respectively. Opening acts include the Smashing Pumpkins, Rancid and the Linda Lindas in North America and Nothing But Thieves, the Hives, Donots, the Interrupters and Maid of Ace in Europe.
