Can the world’s biggest punk band capture the zeitgeist on their new album like American Idiot once did? They talk about staying positive in the age of Trump – and how people have forgotten to love each other • Why Green Day and 90s punk still resonates with today’s young music fans

Green Day are in their modest rehearsal space in their hometown of Oakland, California, a little haven in a country on the turn. The trio of 47-year-olds – still the world’s biggest punk band – are posing for photos with singer-guitarist-songwriter Billie Joe Armstrong’s prized Triumph motorcycle. Then someone remembers that the band’s forthcoming Hella Mega Tour, alongside fellow alt-rock survivors Fall Out Boy and Weezer, is sponsored by Harley-Davidson. The Triumph is put back under its protective sheet.

“Welcome to Trump’s America,” sighs bassist Mike Dirnt when I tell him of my journey via San Francisco, where I was shocked to see so much desperate homelessness. “A place where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Sadly, I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet.” The band own a number of Oakland businesses – “it’s important for us to do what we can to lift up our local area,” Dirnt says – while Armstrong still goes on protests and attends local punk shows.

Armstrong is a fan of new bands such as ShitKid, the Chats and White Reaper, though is often confused by what he sees. “I’ll see kids wearing leather jackets and a Grateful Dead T-shirt. How did that happen?” Recently, he attended a show only to be confronted by a young punk with giant liberty-spiked hair, “looking like he’d just walked out of a squat”, asking for a selfie on a brand-new iPhone. “It’s cool and it’s weird,” he laughs. “I’m just excited people are still doing cool shit.”

Green Day’s new album is titled Father of All Motherfuckers and yet, surprisingly for a band best known for delivering 2004’s George Bush-baiting rock opera American Idiot, they say Donald Trump had little influence on the new record. At the same time, they insist it is political.

“It’s all there in the songs,” Armstrong says. “I’m singing about ‘looking out for the jingoes and heathens’ or ‘another black kid shot in town’.” There’s a lyric about bulletproof backpacks designed as protection during school shootings, “one of the most absurd ideas I’ve ever heard”. But Armstrong doesn’t want to be on the nose. “Everything that is happening in the world is right there on Twitter. It’s so confusing and it’s so depressing. I really wanted to create some kind of escape for people; I didn’t want to be so obvious.” Satirical punk site The Hard Times wrote a story the day of Trump’s inauguration titled Future Green Day Concept Album Sworn Into Office. “It was funny, but I didn’t want us to do that. It wasn’t where our heads were at – at all.” Where were your heads at? “I was listening to Little Richard.”

He continues: “It’s not that I’m ignoring it, it’s just that the current political climate is something I just can’t draw any inspiration from. I’ve got tons of feelings about it. I think Trump is a piece of shit. I think [Senate majority leader] Mitch McConnell is pure evil. All they care about is looking after the rich and they don’t care about the common people. But I find no inspiration there. It’s so depressing. It’s hard to dance when you can’t get out of bed.”

“And the world has become so divisive,” says drummer and band goof Tré Cool. “We wanted to try to bring people together. It’s become something of a far-out concept to love each other!”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Green Day on stage, 1997. Photograph: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc

This year the band will turn 34. No punk band has made it this far. The Sex Pistols lasted three years, the Clash 10, the Ramones 22. Green Day are writing the blueprint while living it, so it is no surprise that they have sometimes made mistakes. Last year Armstrong duetted with Morrissey on his covers album California Son – a terrible look in the wake of Morrissey’s vocal support for far-right organisations and individuals.

“I wasn’t aware until the song came out,” says Armstrong. “We do the song, and he was very lovely, and then the song comes out and a lot of Brits were like: what the hell are you doing? I really did not have a clue … ” Bewitched by the singer’s status as an 80s indie godhead, he simply failed in his due diligence. Cool pipes up, giggling: “Hey, we’ve all got our Ted Nugents, right?” – a reference to the US rocker and gun enthusiast.

Green Day have endured major wobbles and are now in “uncharted territory,” as Armstrong puts it. “People get over their high school bands. They don’t go on to spend every day in their orbit for the next 20 years.”

After two records on the late, great East Bay punk imprint Lookout!, in 1994 the young band signed with major label Reprise. The punk scene was aghast. 924 Gilman Street, the puritanical Berkeley-based all-ages headquarters of said scene banned the group from performing. Green Day released Dookie in February of that year and it sold 20m copies. They wouldn’t return to play Gilman Street until 2015.

Old friends and fellow scenesters might not have wanted to talk to them any more, but everyone else did. Along with Smash, the third album by fellow Californians the Offspring (at 11m sales, the biggest-selling record on an independent label ever) and the rise to prominence of the Berkeley band Rancid, Dookie spearheaded an interest in American punk rock not seen since the birth of the New York CBGB scene 20 years earlier – but with the sales to match the cultural impact.

“We were always thinking about legacy,” Cool says. “We never wanted songs to sound like we’d relied too much on whatever recording techniques were in vogue. We knew we were in this for the long haul.”

Then came, if not decline, then some cooling off. The excellent Insomniac arrived in 1995 and struggled on account of not being Dookie. Nimrod followed in 1997; another strong collection of songs that became most notable for featuring a coda, the purely acoustic Good Riddance (Time of Your Life), that suggested there might be more to Armstrong’s songwriting than three chords and fuzz. The song soundtracked the Seinfeld finale and became a hit at US high school proms, its melancholy dovetailing with events that marked a passing of time. And yet by 2000’s Warning, the mall had been relinquished to the nu-metal kids. Warning became the first release of Green Day’s major-label career not to go multi-platinum. They wouldn’t release an album for another four years.

“I find it hard between records thinking what I’m going to write about,” Armstrong says. “I get a lot of self-doubt. I don’t think I’ve ever realistically thought the band might be done, but I have questioned whether I could do it any more.”

Green Day re-emerged amid war in the Middle East under Bush. Young people who might once have been fans were returning in body bags. “Sieg heil to the President Gasman,” Armstrong sang on Holiday from the album American Idiot, and if punks weren’t supposed to sign to major labels, they certainly weren’t supposed to release double albums that became Broadway musicals.

It sent them stratospheric and the weight of expectation since has never truly lifted: 2009’s 21st Century Breakdown felt ordinary in the shadow of its predecessor; the release of three albums in a year – 2012’s ¡Uno!, ¡Dos! and ¡Tré! – favoured quantity over quality. An ill-fated festival appearance saw Armstrong, his set about to be cut short, destroy his guitar and rant: “I’m not Justin Bieber!” He subsequently went into rehab for the abuse of alcohol and prescription pills.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Armstrong playing live, 2017. Photograph: Ferdy Damman/EPA

The band slunk into another period of near-irrelevance. They had emerged from the previous one with a genre-defying, generation-defining reboot – this time all they had was a good record, 2016’s Revolution Radio. Few bands harness the zeitgeist once, let alone twice. Is Father of All Motherfuckers that third moment? No, but it is the closest they have come since American Idiot. At 26min 16sec, it is their shortest album, featuring a collection of songs as fast and furious as any in their discography. It sounds as if they are having fun for the first time in years, without trying too hard.

Armstrong says it is an “homage to the roots of rock’n’roll music, the music that inspired us to do this. That doesn’t just mean punk rock. It’s Martha and the Vandellas and Mott the Hoople. Old bubblegum music like the Archies. Powerpop. Garage music … Playing Motown through Green Day, so to speak.”

You might read the fizzing Father of All Motherfuckers as Green Day saying they are not done yet. Ask them if their forthcoming triple-header tour is an attempt to halt a downturn in the band’s fortunes and Armstrong will laugh and say, in reference to 80s-themed package tours: “There are many differences between Green Day and Kajagoogoo … We’re going to keep making records that matter. I always want whatever we do to feel like the first time we played at Gilman, or the first time we made a rock opera.”

By embracing the band’s love of rock’n’roll, Green Day are also trying to reclaim something at their nation’s core. Instead of an overt appearance from Trump in the lyrics, there is positivity and make-do spirit; it feels like a record about a beloved US, not the US that presently exists. “I think good rock’n’roll has always had this ability to be transcendent,” says Dirnt. “A song might be about losing your gal or whatever other misfortune has come your way … but the best stuff takes your hand and helps you dance through the apocalypse. I’d like to think that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Rock as an act of resistance, I offer. “Oh yeah,” they all chime. “I like that!”

Father of All Motherfuckers is out on Reprise.