‘Nimrod’: the album that predicted the future of Green Day
By the mid-1990s, rock and roll didn’t know what it wanted to be in many respects. Grunge gave everyone something to hold onto when Nirvana burst onto the scene, but between 1995 and 1997, it wasn’t clear what was the next big thing in rock, with everything from ska to industrial music to Britpop all having a crack at the top of the charts. Although Green Day firmly belonged in the pop-punk category in many respects, that description never sat well with them throughout their career.
They had pop tendencies and were proud of their punk origins, but Billie Joe Armstrong always found the labels to be too limiting for him. He knew that he didn’t want to play the same three chords forever, and despite lashing out in anger at those calling them sell-outs on Insomniac, he never felt as satisfied as he wanted. It was time for them to hunker down a little bit, and Armstrong spent all of that time writing songs.
And when the band finally reconvened, Nimrod turned into one of the wildest experiments the band had ever done. Although it wasn’t enough for some fans to start jumping off the boat like they did on Warning a few years later, ‘Hitchin’ A Ride’ was certainly strange by the band’s standards, riding in on a galloping rhythm that belongs in a swing tune, thrashing their way through the breakdown section, and eventually ending things off with a cheesy Beatles chord to finish it off.
Everything about that opening single doesn’t scream pop-punk, and listening to Nimrod, it’s like listening to two albums in one. There are still pieces of it that ring true as Green Day ragers like ‘Nice Guys Finish Last’ and ‘Reject’, but the whole point of the record was to throw everything at the wall to see what stuck. And for a band that was categorised as a teenybopper version of punk rock, they were far more eclectic than people thought.
In fact, many of the best moments on the record hinted at where the band would be going on their future projects. ‘Walking Alone’ was a good indicator of the acoustic approach that would happen on Warning, ‘Take Back’ and ‘Platypus’ expressed the raw anger they would channel on ‘St Jimmy’, and while ‘Last Ride In’ is the last tune anyone remembers from the record, it’s a fine piece of ambient surf-rock to throw on in the background.
But if you want to hear the true moment where the band crossed boundaries, there are two sections worth paying attention to. Let’s look at the most high-profile one first: ‘Good Riddance’. This tune might have been one of the most sentimental songs that the band would ever write, and while many fans would have been rightfully pissed off, the band couldn’t have survived if they kept making pop-punk. They needed to grow, and when hearing those strings come in, everyone could tell they wanted to become legends of rock rather than the cool underground band everyone talked about.
Then again, the biggest moment on the record really comes as a two-in-one track, ‘Jinx’ and ‘Haushinka’. Although both of the tracks have little to do with each other from a musical perspective, hearing them nail the transition between the tunes was a massive improvement over what they had done previously. ‘Brain Stew’ and ‘Jaded’ flowed pretty well on the previous record, and going from the end of ‘Chump’ into ‘Longview’ on Dookie was impressive as well, but this was a crash course for what would happen when they started making their operas.
Because when listening to American Idiot, it’s hard to think of ‘Jesus of Suburbia’ and ‘Homecoming’ being birthed if ‘Jinx’ and ‘Haushinka’ hadn’t perfected it first. Both of them are far from the greatest Green Day songs ever made, but right in the middle of the record, they are a great way of jolting the listener out of their seat when going down this musical wild ride.
So while Nimrod does get nods from many fans and critics as an overlooked Green Day album, the amount of ideas spilling out of every song is more than worthy of giving it a place next to Dookie in the pantheon of classic Green Day records. It might be a bit messy in places like The Beatles’ White Album was, but given the amount of content on the record, there is a shockingly small amount of material that didn’t end up getting fleshed out even further down the line.
