“Bang, Bang” by Green Day

Green Day opened the Revolution Radio campaign with "Bang, Bang" in 2016, the first taste of their twelfth studio album, and it hits like a band remembering how fast they used to play. Billie Joe Armstrong's guitar is all serrated edges, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool drive it at a sprint, and the three produced it themselves before handing it to Andrew Scheps to mix.

The subject is anything but nostalgic. Armstrong wrote it in the voice of a mass shooter, reacting to the shootings that kept tearing through the United States, which puts the snot of their early punk records in service of the political anger of their later ones. The video plays it darkly, with masked doubles of the band robbing a bank and then turning up at a party where the real trio is playing.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.