Insomniac is the fourth studio album by the American rock band Green Day, released on October 10, 1995, by Reprise Records.

Released as the follow-up to the band's multi-platinum breakthrough Dookie, Insomniac featured a heavier, hardcore punk sound, with bleaker lyrics than its predecessor.

[1] The album received generally positive reviews from critics, who praised the singer Billie Joe Armstrong's songwriting and sarcastic sense of humor.

Though it peaked at number 2 on the Billboard 200 chart and was certified 2× Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America[3] in 1996, Insomniac did not have the sales endurance of its predecessor Dookie, largely due to its slightly darker lyrical tone and its heavier and more abrasive sound.

Green Day's previous album Dookie (1994), their first for a major label, was approaching the ten-million sales mark by the time of recording Insomniac, and the band's success saw them rejected by the punk circles in which the group got their start.

"[8] During this period the band members also underwent changes in their personal lives; Armstrong married and had a son, while the drummer Tré Cool and his wife had a daughter.

[10][9] For Armstrong, reaching all these milestones was a surreal experience and he struggled to process these sudden changes, noting that "what I really wanted to do was keep working, and keep writing songs...I didn't really stop and smell the roses".

[9] The band decorated the walls with notes underneath song titles jokingly providing instructions for achieving the intended tempo for each track; these included "Must pop Valium for this one" and "Must take crank for this one".

Before takes, the group would drink excessive amounts of coffee, "squeeze every last drop of energy" into the recordings, and then rest immediately afterward.

"[8] Music journalist Andrew Earles said producer Rob Cavallo "helped the band make huge guitar walls out of riffs and grow away from the shiny-happy locker-room dip-shittery of Dookie.

"Geek Stink Breath", the first single, discusses methamphetamine use, including side effects such as the formation of facial scabs and an accelerated pulse.

"[13] It is followed by "86", which discusses the rejection Green Day faced from the 924 Gilman Street music club in Berkeley after the band's rise to fame in 1994.

After visiting collage artist Winston Smith for the album cover, Billie Joe Armstrong asked him how he managed to make such intricate pieces in such short times.

The collage on the album cover was created by Smith[19] and is called God Told Me to Skin You Alive, a reference to the Dead Kennedys song "I Kill Children".

[18] Green Day's version, however, is slightly different from the original, with the woman holding Armstrong's iconic Sonic Blue Fernandes imitation Stratocaster rather than an acoustic guitar.

This, combined with the God Told Me to Skin You Alive cover collage, led Winwood to comment that "everything about Insomniac was noticeably different from Dookie, yet fully informed by the vast shadow it cast.

"[8] Larry Livermore, co-founder of the band's former label Lookout Records, found Insomniac to be "depressing", and recalls that he "was even a bit worried about them" upon hearing the single "Brain Stew".

[8] A staff writer for People compared the release of Insomniac to Nirvana's In Utero (1993), which featured a darker, less accessible sound in the wake of the success of the band's multi-platinum album Nevermind.

It earned three and a half out of five stars from Rolling Stone, which said "In punk the good stuff actually unfolds and gains meaning as you listen without sacrificing any of its electric, haywire immediacy.

Once more, the songs relate the travails of a pathetic, self-loathing goofball whose sense of self-worth is continually reduced to rubble by sundry jerks, authority figures, and cultural elitists."

By comparison, Green Day sound exactly the same as on their first album, albeit with crisper production and, ominously, a palpable degeneration in their sense of humor.

Throughout Insomniac, there are vague references to the band's startling multi-platinum breakthrough, but the album is hardly a stark confessional on the level of Nirvana's In Utero.

While nothing on the album is as immediate as "Basket Case" or "Longview," the band has gained a powerful sonic punch, which goes straight for the gut but sacrifices the raw edge they so desperately want to keep and makes the record slightly tame.

Billie Joe hasn't lost much of his talent for simple, tuneful hooks, but after a series of songs that all sound pretty much the same, it becomes clear that he needs to push himself a little bit more if Green Day ever want to be something more than a good punk-pop band.