Green Day released the single “Back in the USA” on November 17, 2017, alongside Greatest Hits: God's Favorite Band through Reprise Records. The compilation paired 20 catalog tracks with two new recordings, giving listeners fresh material alongside songs that had already defined different periods of the band's career.
Billie Joe Armstrong told the Associated Press that he wrote the song after Green Day came home from a European tour following Donald Trump's election. “I felt we’d come back to a different America that I was trying to recognize,” he said. That account gives the title a particular tension: coming home hadn't brought a sense of familiarity. A collection built around recognizable songs became the setting for a new one about feeling unsettled in your own country.
Directors Brendan Walter and Greg Yagolnitzer gave that feeling a visual counterpart. The music video places Armstrong in a suburb styled after a 1950s television sitcom, where a visit from a sunglasses saleswoman disrupts the monochrome routine. Looking through the lenses exposes instructions hidden in everyday advertising. Rolling Stone Italia identified the connection to John Carpenter's They Live: apparently ordinary surroundings conceal a much uglier reality, visible only to people wearing the glasses.
The band eventually takes that discovery onto television. By putting the glasses over a camera lens during a presidential broadcast, they expose a leader resembling Trump as an alien. Green Day take over the transmission, and the world changes from black and white to color. The video makes its political target explicit while telling the story through a science-fiction gag.
The compilation had considerably more history to cover than International Superhits!, Green Day's 2001 greatest-hits release. That earlier collection preceded American Idiot. By 2017, a survey could connect “Basket Case” with “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and extend into the Revolution Radio period. Those selections placed the new single at the end of a much broader account of the band's work.
For the other new recording, Green Day returned to “Ordinary World,” originally released on Revolution Radio, and made it a duet with Miranda Lambert. Armstrong recalled that they recorded it in about an hour at a small Denver studio when their tours reached the same city. The collaboration followed their appearance together at the 2014 Grammy Awards. It gave listeners another version of an existing song alongside the previously unheard “Back in the USA.”
The running order left the new composition with the final word. “Ordinary World” occupied track 21, followed by “Back in the USA” at track 22: Green Day ended their retrospective with a response to the political moment in which they assembled it.
