Of their many cultural quirks, Americans retain a slightly ridiculous and yet rather touching belief in the power of ‘punk rock’ (nobody in the UK ever calls it that, of course: it’s just ‘punk’).

Despite laying claim to the progenitors of the whole punk thing – the Stooges, the New York Dolls, the Ramones – Americans still don’t quite seem to understand it. They actually think it was about the music, bless them. More bafflingly, they seem to regard ‘punk rock’ as something that has enduring currency, rather than being a brief – though significant – cultural phenomenon of the mid-to-late 1970s that was more or less over before it began.

Americans still don’t seem to understand punk. They think it’s about the music, bless them

Which brings us to Green Day, an American ‘punk rock’ band that formed in California in the late 1980s and has been bashing away ever since, very successfully. They have sold somewhere in the region of 75 million records, something Sham 69 never managed. This week, Green Day release their 14th album. It’s a ‘punk rock’ record. The cover of Saviors tell us as much, revelling in its faux simplicity, the blocky, garish pink font framing a black and white photograph depicting street violence during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. We are, it seems, back in 1978.

The songs place great virtue in being punky – and not just punky, alas, but politically punky. ‘The American Dream is Killing Me’ is singer Billie Joe Armstrong’s comment on the state of post-Trump America. ‘People on the street, unemployed and obsolete,’ he sings in his snotty punk voice over stop-start guitars and a loping beat borrowed from ‘London Calling’. ‘Strange Days are Here to Stay’ offers similar insights.

‘Look Ma, No Brains!’ is fun, though not quite as much fun as its title. ‘Dilemma’ is a punchy anti-love anthem. ‘One-Eyed Bastard’ takes the riff from Pink’s ‘So What’ as it’s start point, which isn’t a terrible idea. The wistful ‘1981’ gives the game away: Green Day deal in turbo-driven nostalgia. I suspect Saviors will become one of their better regarded albums, yet these catchy, committed, rousing songs nevertheless feel like they have no business being written and played in 2024. Punk rock lives! So what.

In the fifty-odd years since Joni Mitchell’s Blue was released, deeply autobiographical songwriting has steadily become a stakes-raising game of truth or dare. It sometimes seems that many (excellent) current artists – Olivia Rodrigo, Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus – are competing to see how much brutal diary-entry detail can be squeezed into one song. Taylor Swift, at least, is adept at offering the appearance of revelation while diligently covering her tracks. For the cynical, detailing the minutiae of serially messed-up lives has clear commercial advantages. For the less sceptical, such bold truth-telling offers catharsis, communion and comfort. Even so, it feels important to note that relentless guts-spilling isn’t necessarily any more creatively worthy or valuable than simply making stuff up.

‘16’, which arrives at the halfway point on Going Through It, the debut album by US singer-songwriter, podcaster and essayist Eliza McLamb, underlines this last point perfectly. A bleak misery memoir in three monotone minutes, it gains no extra kudos for being a verbatim account, apparently, of McLamb’s very own annus horribilis. (Side note: to critique the art is not to invalidate the lived experience.)

If the album has a theme, it’s about surviving the messy business of adolescence and somehow mapping a path into adulthood. Such subject matter comes with obvious pitfalls. On ‘Anything You Want’, McLamb stumbles clumsily, ironically or not, into self-absorption. ‘I’m a hard person to unravel,’ she sings. ‘I’m a labyrinth in the dark.’ It feels like the musical equivalent of wearing a T-shirt stating: ‘It’s Complicated’. Yet elsewhere she has a knack for framing the sore stuff in more interesting ways, using shifting viewpoints, irony and humour: ‘I’m crying in a way that’s not pathetic,’ she sings. ‘You wouldn’t get it.’

There’s actually lots to like about Going Through It. McLamb’s voice is slyly conversational, unshowy and always interesting. Her music, though conventional enough, encompasses crunchy guitar pop, pretty, country-tinged ballads – ‘Crybaby’ sounds like Patsy Cline on psychotropics – and woozy modern acoustica in the vein of Sufjan Stevens and Elliot Smith (‘Strike’; ‘To Wake Up’).

Her heart seems to lie in the quieter, sadder material, but the album is more convincing on upbeat numbers such as ‘Mythologize Me’, a fizzing pop song which marries the melodic zest of mid-period Swift to a smart lyric nailing the kind of men who are only attracted to a woman’s perceived messiness. ‘Punch Drunk’ and ‘Modern Woman’ similarly light sparks under the sometimes enervating introspection. An artist of many parts, not all of them yet fully formed, expect to hear more from McLamb this year.