“Holiday” by Green Day

"Holiday" is Green Day at their most furious and focused, an anti-war protest song that sits third on American Idiot, their seventh album, from 2004, and serves as a kind of opening act for "Boulevard of Broken Dreams". It later went out as the album's third single on Reprise.

Billie Joe Armstrong wrote the words, the band shares the music, and they produced it with Rob Cavallo, with Chris Lord-Alge mixing. It's punk rock built for arenas: a stomping, sprinting riff and Armstrong spitting his disgust at warmongers and the powers that be with the snotty energy of a band that had suddenly found something big to be angry about.

It went to number one on both the Hot Modern Rock Tracks and Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks charts and reached number 19 on the Billboard Hot 100. It entered the UK chart at number 11 and made the top 20 in Canada, Denmark, Ireland, New Zealand and Norway.

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