Photo by Greg Chow

From 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours to Warning, we count down Green Day’s most underrated pre-American Idiot tracks

The legendary pop-punk icons Green Day are currently on tour in the United States, celebrating the 20th and 30th anniversaries of their classic albums Dookie and American Idiot, respectively, by performing both of those albums in full. Eventually, that tour will hit my hometown of San Diego, where they’ll headline a bill also featuring fellow ’90s stalwarts The Smashing Pumpkins and Rancid, and precocious newcomers The Linda Lindas. My teenage nostalgia senses are already tingling.

While most of the mainstream music listening public recognizes Green Day for those two seminal albums, the truth is, their discography is very stacked, with a number of other albums that arguably come close to legend status (Kerplunk, Insomniac, Nimrod, etc). Not only that, but those albums also have a deep arsenal of essential non-singles. For a band that so many people grew up on, the Bay Area band has proven to be equally adept at conjuring a surefire radio hit as they are at stacking their albums with deep cuts that also could’ve been hits. Once you get past their 15 to 20 biggest singles, their catalogue gets even more impressive just based on the sheer quantity of quality tracks. It’s no wonder they’ve managed to accrue such a huge, devoted, and cross-generational fanbase. For the average casual Green Day listener, you come for those big songs, but you’ll stay for the deep cuts, and soon enough, you’ll be a die-hard too.

With the band still rocking their way across America, we take a closer look at some of their best deep cuts – from debut 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours to 2001’s Warning – that cemented their legacy at a surprisingly early point in their career.

15. “Deadbeat Holiday” (Warning)

Warning is an interesting but slightly scattershot album. It’s got some of Green Day’s most anthemic hits (“Minority,” “Waiting,”), but there’s also a few tracks that I tend to skip right over. Nonetheless, “Deadbeat Holiday” is one that I will never, ever skip. Billie Joe’s always worshipped The Replacements, and this track has a bit of that jangly, sentimental midwest spirit to go along with some of Green Day’s most whistle-clean production ever. With its catchy chorus, “Deadbeat Holiday” worms its way into your brain and never leaves.

14. “Scattered” (Nimrod)

When Green Day gets melancholic and reflective, it usually results in some of their most piercing and relatable work. “Scattered” is a sad song in which the narrator looks back on a past relationship with regret, and here, that emotional journey is rendered through searing power chords and poignant lyricism, resulting in perhaps one of the most affecting tracks of the band’s career. It’s a bit too raw and introspective to be a radio hit, which is perhaps why it’s a bit slept on in their catalogue – but nothing else on Nimrod quite matches its sense of wounded nostalgia, and the spiritual turning of a new leaf.

13. “80” (Kerplunk)

Pretty much every track on Kerplunk is a locked and loaded DIY hit, and “80” just fires on all cylinders: throttling bass, crashing drums, driving guitars, Billie’s longing vocals, and the epic chord flow on the chorus. The lyrics portray Billie missing his wife Adrienne (aka Adie, or 80), conveying a love so strong that it borders on mental illness. As an album, Kerplunk leans very heavily towards the punk side of Green Day’s sound spectrum, and the instrumental and emotional rawness of “80” is just one example that plays into that.

12. “Poprocks and Coke” (International Superhits!)

A somewhat stripped-down Green Day ditty that ebbs and flows in buoyant ways, “Poprocks and Coke” was released as part of the band’s first greatest hits compilation, International Superhits!, in 2001. The title is a bit ambiguous, seemingly suggesting that the people portrayed in the song are actually toxic for each another, despite the twee sweetness of the melodies and the cutesy (and somewhat stalker-ish, now that I think about it) lyrics. In any case, it’s an enjoyable slice of Replacements-esque indie punk loaded with pop hooks, and an unexpected non-single to garner radio airplay pre-American Idiot.

11. “Sassafras Roots” (Dookie)

When releasing the singles for Dookie, Green Day clearly chose wisely. But I’m still convinced that they could have picked just about any track on the album, and it still would have been a career-making hit. In a parallel universe, “Sassafras Roots” is one of those singles, because it’s undoubtedly one of the poppiest tracks of Green Day’s early career – a short, sweet, saccharine bop about two slackers being unproductive together: “may I waste your time too?”. You can just imagine this track being an alt chart smash with an eye-popping music video on regular rotation on MTV to boot. Instead, it’s just a killer deep cut.

10. “Going To Pasalacqua” (1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours)

1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours is a surprisingly mature and fascinating debut LP that lays down the songwriting formula upon which Green Day would build the rest of their career. “Going To Pasalacqua” is the best and most fully-formed track on the album – packed with an infectious singalong chorus and driving pop-punk power chords – and it still absolutely holds up as one of their greatest songs ever. When you go back and listen to this, it reminds you that, even as young teenagers, Green Day had that star quality from the start. Impressive stuff that indicated a level well beyond their age.

9. “86” (Insomniac)

On the whole, Insomniac is a remarkably consistent and deeply underrated album, with one of the high points being the non-single “86,” a catchy clap-back to the “selling out” vitriol that plagued the group post-Dookie (“86” being a reference to getting kicked out of the club, or in their case, banned from 924 Gilman). Ever the chorus whisperers, Green Day fashion one singalong-inducing line after another, with the incendiary guitar riffage and heavy percussion pivoting Insomniac back to the band’s more scorched-earth DIY punk roots.

8. “Christie Road” (Kerplunk)

“Christie Road” is a tale of two halves, and an early demonstration of the two sides of Green Day’s musical coin. The first half is a sentimental, reflective ballad about wanting to retreat to one’s “happy place” in the face of societal woe. The second half is about actually being there. It’s a cathartic, effusive release of moshpit-inducing riffs, dropping the mournful sorrow and embracing the glee of escape. For so many people, Green Day is an escape from a certain type of madness, and an embracing of another, and “Christie Road” distills that spirit down to three and a half perfect minutes.

7. “2000 Light Years Away” (Kerplunk)

A good chunk of Kerplunk is about Billie Joe’s relationship with his girlfriend and eventual wife Adrienne, and opener “2000 Light Years Away” is the most stark example. Like a journal entry, Billie Joe pines for her despite the distance separating them – him being in California and her in Minnesota. The track’s combination of confessional verses, catchy choruses, and exaggerated imagery of being 2,000 lightyears away instead of miles makes this an underrated, all-time Green Day gem, and one of the best opening tracks to any album they’ve released.

6. “Burnout” (Dookie)

I’m not sure you can actually consider “Burnout” to be a bonafide deep cut. On one hand, it’s the opening track of their best and most famous album, and it’s an instant earworm that deftly sets the stage for the rest of the journey. On the other hand, it was never a radio single, and Green Day rarely perform it live outside of full-album tours, and it’s become a bit of a rallying cry amongst die-hards. “Burnout” is a perfect intro to not just Dookie, but Green Day in general, and it’s the type of opening track that you’ll play over and over again before you even think about hitting play on the next song.

5. “Haushinka” (Nimrod)

Originally recorded as a demo in the band’s early days – they originally planned to put it on Kerplunk – “Haushinka” is an epic track that would be released years later on Nimrod. The track’s pained and poignant but no less pummeling sound is a perfect fit on the album, and features one of the more unique and charged-up choruses in Green Day’s discography. Overall, it’s a tight, reflective ripper about missed connections, and that feeling of longing and regret that haunts your nostalgia after a brief encounter with a beautiful stranger. It’s a feeling that Billie Joe expresses very well.

4. “F.O.D.” (Dookie)

“F.O.D.,” short for “Fuck Off and Die,” is another Green Day track that works in two halves – much like “Christy Road,” but with absolutely none of the melancholy. The first half is a plucky, thoughtful solitary guitar ballad narrated from the POV of someone who is tired and fed up with the people around him. The tension simmers and builds up until the track’s second half, finally boiling over as Green Day segues into a thrashing punk banger in which the narrator finally, cathartically tells everyone around him to “Fuck Off and Die.” Balancing pensive melody with throttling, defiant crescendos is Green Day’s bread-and-butter, and this penultimate Dookie track cements that album’s legendary status.

3. “Who Wrote Holden Caulfield?” (Kerplunk!)

“Who Wrote Holden Caulfield?” packs so much into its two and a half minutes of runtime: breakneck percussion, crunching riffs, one of Green Day’s best choruses ever, and an entire dissection of the main character from The Cather in the Rye. It’s enthralling to thrash around to this early Kerplunk fan favorite while Billie Joe ruminates on Holden, his outcast ways, and how they relate to his own life as a teenage punk rocker. Indecision, laziness, posturing, hating the world without having any meaningful insight into it – it’s all just a rough-and-tumble fever dream, and Billie Joe’s just trying to figure himself out.

2. “J.A.R.” (Angus Original Soundtrack)

Named for bassist Mike Dirnt’s childhood friend Jason Andrew Relva, who died in a car crash, “J.A.R.” was demo’d early on in Green Day’s career, and eventually released on the soundtrack to the underrated 1995 teen indie-cult film Angus. Sonically, the track is a searing anthem – an effusive, power chord-filled jaunt that lyrically ruminates on death and mortality. Midway through, a massive, wistful bridge and guitar breakdown sends the song to a stratospheric collision of sound and emotion, followed by an even more powerful outro refrain. Somewhere in another universe, this is Green Day’s most universally beloved hit.

1. “Prosthetic Head” (Nimrod)

Simply put, “Prosthetic Head” is the ultimate pop-punk banger, and one of the most perfect encapsulations of Green Day’s sound, their influences, and their worldview. A brutal takedown of all the fakes, phonies, and posers in the scene, here, Billie Joe waxes poetic through a series of bitingly diabolical verses loaded with (plastic/cosmetic) surgical imagery. Melodically, the track opens on groovy Kinks-style riffage before segueing into a wave of heavy momentum-shifting detours, dialing up the swagger, vitriol, and defiant energy to 11. Awkwardly placed on Nimrod (it’s the 18th and final track on the album, and comes right after the inescapably sentimental ballad “Good Riddance”), “Prosthetic Head” probably could have been a big hit if given the right A&R attention at the time. But it’s almost better off for being a bit slept on. Instead, it’s a rousing deep cut – a fan-fave mission statement for which the real die-hards can live by.