Green Day Resurrect an Old Insult: 'NIMRODS' Soundtrack and the New Song "I'm Never Gonna R.I.P."

Twenty-nine years ago, Green Day answered the impossible follow-up to Dookie and Insomniac by refusing to answer it at all — sprawling out into surf, ska, string sections and the acoustic sucker-punch of "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" on 1997's Nimrod, an album whose title doubled as a preemptive shrug at anyone calling them idiots. Now the joke has grown a franchise. On Monday the band announced NIMRODS, a soundtrack tied to a forthcoming comedy film, and dropped a brand-new song, "I'm Never Gonna R.I.P." — their first fresh studio material since 2024's Saviors.

The movie, written and directed by Lee Kirk, is a coming-of-age road comedy about three friends (Mason Thames, Kylr Coffman and Ryan Foust) who pile into a car and drive cross-country under the delusion that their garage band has landed a slot opening for Green Day on New Year's Eve in Los Angeles. It's a premise cribbed, loosely, from the trio's own scrappy early touring years, and the cast leans comedic: The Office alums Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey, plus Mckenna Grace, Fred Armisen, Bobby Lee and Sean Gunn. Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool are all credited as producers alongside Tim Perell and Live Nation Studios' Ryan Kroft and Michael Rapino. Nimrods opens in the U.S. on August 14 (with a limited U.K. bow on August 11).

The title, of course, is the tell. The film was rechristened Nimrods explicitly in reference to the 1997 record — a neat piece of self-mythology from a band that has spent three decades converting adolescent stupidity into arena catharsis. Dirnt framed the project's tone plainly: "It's got a lot of heart. It's triumphant, it's hilarious, and it's got some really heartfelt moments in there, too… It basically follows the story of a band and their adventures trying to get across the country to open for us."

As for the song: "I'm Never Gonna R.I.P." is a two-minute blast of tight, old-fashioned rock 'n' roll bluster, pitched somewhere in the lineage of Elvis Presley, Bill Haley & His Comets and Chuck Berry rather than the mall-punk maximalism of American Idiot. It's greaser Green Day — a band that has never met a decade of pop history it couldn't strip for parts — and at that runtime it's less a statement than a wink.

The soundtrack itself, out July 31 via Reprise, is a fan-service grab bag: 30 tracks in all, anchored by 22 career-spanning Green Day songs and rounded out with four previously unreleased live recordings from the band's run at the Palladium in Los Angeles ("American Idiot," "Know Your Enemy," "Auld Lang Syne" and "Going to Pasalacqua"), plus contributions from The Paradox, Ultra Q, Mckenna Grace and Analog Dogs, the film's fictional band. It arrives on CD, cassette, digital and vinyl.

There's an easy cynical read here — legacy act launches vanity film, sells you a compilation you already own — and Green Day has certainly earned a raised eyebrow or two across the Saviors era. But there's also something disarmingly on-brand about a group whose entire origin story is "three idiots in a van" turning that into a literal movie, then scoring it with a rockabilly toss-off about refusing to die. Nearly thirty years on, the nimrods are still not resting in peace. They're not even resting.

Sources: Consequence; NME; Blabbermouth; Brooklyn Vegan