Green Day fans who caught the band’s headlining performance at Festival d’ete de Quebec on Sunday received a special surprise, as the pop-punk stalwarts debuted a new, unreleased song called “1981.”
You can see footage of the performance below.
The song is a rapid-fire, two-minute blitzkrieg that harks back to ’90s Green Day albums such as Dookie, Insomniac and Nimrod. “She’s gonna bang her head like 1981,” Billie Joe Armstrong sings repeatedly in the chorus, atop sugary melodies that split the difference between pop-punk and power-pop a la Elvis Costello (whom Green Day recently saluted with a previously unreleased cover of “Alison” that appeared on their Nimrod 25th-anniversary box set).
Green Day released their most recent album, Father of All Motherfuckers (often shortened to Father of All …), in February 2020. Following the coronavirus pandemic, they belatedly embarked on the Hella Mega Tour alongside Fall Out Boy and Weezer, though they did not play any songs off their newest album on the road.
Eagle-eyed fans also pointed out that “1981” was the song featured in a teaser video that Green Day posted in 2022. The band has shared several clips previewing a project called “1972,” which fans suspect could be the name of a new song or their next album. (Armstrong, drummer Tre Cool and bassist Mike Dirnt were all born in 1972.)
Solid State Logic also reported in February that Green Day had teamed up again with super-producer Rob Cavallo, who helmed their multiplatinum major-label debut Dookie and worked with them on nearly every album through 2012’s Uno/Dos/Tre album trilogy.
Green Day Live in Austin, Oct. 21, 2022
Pop-punk stalwarts brought exhilarating greatest-hits romp to Austin’s Circuit of the Americas.
