New album dawns for Green Day

OAKLAND, Calif. — Studio 880, where Green Day has worked regularly since about 2001, is in Jingletown, a not exactly gentrified neighborhood squeezed between train tracks, the Oakland estuary and the Nimitz Freeway, I-880, here.

Tre Cool, Green Day's drummer, was behind the wheel and playing tour guide, shuttling a visitor through Berkeley and Oakland to the rock band's landmarks. He cruised past the nonprofit, collectively owned, all-ages "conscientious punk" club 924 Gilman Street, where Green Day established itself in the early 1990s while the band members were still teenagers. He stopped at the house that Green Day shared while making its blockbuster 1994 album, "Dookie," which has sold almost 8 million copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. (Squatters, he noted, looted the house while Green Day toured.)

One of the outer walls of the band's studio, visible from the freeway overpass, is currently painted black-and-white, professionally inscribed, graffiti-style, with the lyrics to "Before the Lobotomy," a song on Green Day's new album, "21st Century Breakdown" (Reprise), with rabble-rousing lines like, "Well, it's enough to make you sick/To cast a stone and throw a brick." The album is Green Day's most ambitious collection yet, the distillation of dozens of songs and years of work. "I came into the studio at one point," said Mike Dirnt, Green Day's bassist, "and I went: 'It's been over three years. I think I've walked through these doors a thousand times.' "

"21st Century Breakdown" follows Green Day's "American Idiot," the politically charged concept album from 2004 that has sold more than 5 million copies domestically and an estimated 12 million worldwide. Dirnt said, "When you get to the top of the mountain you look out and you take a deep breath and go: 'Wow, this is amazing. I don't want to go back down now.' "

He added: "Maybe we garnered confidence from 'American Idiot,' but it was by no means cocky. And yeah, we were scared and nervous."

But "American Idiot" left Green Day determined to top itself — and with "21st Century Breakdown," the band has done just that. The music is more expansive in every way, encompassing more styles and arriving in a newly spacious, three-dimensional production.

At a time when younger punk-pop bands are singing about girl trouble and professional envy, Green Day has dared to offer something far denser and more demanding: a whirlwind of thoughts about activism, redemption and destruction. The rage and sorrows of "American Idiot" are pushed even further in "21st Century Breakdown," in songs where idealism and the urge to annihilate are constantly grappling, never far apart.