When was the last time it felt like a rock album took over the whole damn world?

For the most part, rock music has not been the defining music of the past two decades. There were exceptions along the way: The Suburbs winning the Grammy for Album of the Year felt like a coronation moment for indie rock. In Rainbows started a conversation around music commerce and distribution that helped shaped the industry we’re living in now…for better and for worse. Albums like Viva La Vida and Stadium Arcadium kept rock on mainstream pop radio and seemed legitimately inescapable for months and months.

But none of those albums hit every marker of a true-blue, world-conquering, era-defining blockbuster – the type of album rock ‘n’ roll used to serve up regularly, before hip-hop and R&B and big-tent pop took its crown. No rock album has checked all those boxes since 20 years ago this weekend. Since American Idiot.

Before this album even came out, it felt seismic – and “seismic” probably wasn’t what anyone was expecting from Green Day at the time. The band had followed a path of diminishing returns (commercially, at least) ever since they’d set the world on fire 10 years previous with Dookie. That album was a bedrock pop-punk classic, an album that laid the groundwork for a sound that became the go-to music in every teenager’s bedroom during the late ‘90s and early 2000s. But Green Day themselves weren’t really part of that turn-of-the-century dominance. While bands like Blink-182 and The Offspring were carving out household name status for themselves, Green Day were making increasingly commercially unviable records, like 1997’s all-over-the-place Nimrod, or 2000’s underrated folk-meets-pop-punk gem Warning. Depending on who you ask, the Green Day that existed at the outset of 2004 were already has-beens, coasting on past glories. They already had a greatest hits album out, after all, and arguably their most enduring song was an acoustic tearjerker that you couldn’t get through any graduation ceremony without hearing at least once. While other bands were carrying the torch Green Day had lit, the Berkeley punks were somehow already elder statesmen. It felt like their chapter of the story was over.