Birthed from the colorful, politicized Bay Area punk scene, Green Day earned a small but dedicated following with a pair of releases on Seattle indie Lookout. 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours was a compilation of three previously released independent EPs.  

 Although Kerplunk lacked the production value of later releases, it demonstrated the band's uncanny ability to meld irresistible pop hooks and charming, disarmingly honest lyrics with punk grit.  

 Green Day’s blockbuster major-label debut, Dookie, countered grunge's increasingly gloomy outlook with a more upbeat, life-affirming punk racket. The East Bay stoners played peppy pop-punk, uncomplicated by heavy metal or deep thoughts, and took pop radio by storm. 

 But while not entirely successful, Insomniac showed that the poster boys for the punk revival had more in their repertoire than snotty Ramones- and Buzzcocks-style stomps. The album's best song and biggest hit, “Brain Stew,” delivered slivers of silence between bursts of lead-heavy sound.  

 With Nimrod, the band built an arsenal of musical and emotional tools but still not the kind of complete package they would in years to come. The band contrasts the speedy punk of "Nice Guys Finish Last" with the effortlessly gorgeous acoustic ballad "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).” 

 On Warning, Billie Joe Armstrong began to diversify his lyrical repertoire to match the band's more expansive textures and its members' more complicated lives, foreshadowing the template of rich musical exploration and inspirational lyrics that would dominate albums to come. 

 It would be four years before Green Day returned with American Idiot, a fully-realized rock opera and great leap forward in the band's musical capabilities and cultural importance. The band had learned to fuse its pop sensibilities with a newfound propensity for storytelling. 

 Remarkably, Green Day returned five years later with an even more ambitious conceptual project, 21st Century Breakdown. Full of religious overtones, the 18-track epic tells the story of two young punk lovers, Christian and Gloria, adrift in the broken post-Bush era.