Green Day

About

Also known as: Greenday, グリーン・デイ

Few bands flipped punk rock into a mainstream phenomenon quite like Green Day. Formed in the Bay Area in 1987 by Billie Joe Armstrong and Mike Dirnt, they built their reputation through the underground 924 Gilman Street scene before their 1994 major label debut Dookie turned everything upside down, eventually shipping over 20 million copies in the US alone and winning them a Grammy for Best Alternative Album. Their catalog spans scrappy indie punk through to full blown rock opera: American Idiot in 2004 sold six million copies stateside, spawned a Tony winning Broadway musical, and won Best Rock Album at the Grammys. With drummer Tré Cool completing the classic trio, Green Day has kept pushing through more than three decades of releases. Albums like Nimrod and 21st Century Breakdown showed they could reinvent themselves without losing the plot, and Revolution Radio debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015 and have sold roughly 75 million records worldwide, which makes the argument for them being one of the most influential rock acts of the last 40 years pretty hard to dispute.