By the time Nickelback strolls into album number ten, you'd think the jokes would’ve burned out, the bonfire extinguished, the keg taken home days ago. But here they come again—Chad Kroeger and Ryan Peake—talking about Get Rollin’ like a band that still gets a kick out of plugging in, turning up, and seeing what happens next. “They’re telling us this is album 10,” Chad shrugs, as if someone else has been tallying the years since the late ’90s. Twenty-five years, ten albums, five presidents, three formats, and however many memes later, they’re still here, still loud.
Ask them how they keep the flame alive, and Chad answers with a line that sounds like a Nickelback lyric because, well, it already is. “I barked out, ‘Loving you is like surfing on a tidal wave,’” he says. The room collectively went, Okay, yeah, we know where this is going. Chad spells it out: the excitement, the danger, the inevitability of the crash, and the thrill of riding it anyway. Not exactly subtle, but subtlety has never paid their mortgage.
Ryan jumps in with the other side of the machine: fun. “It’s gotta be fun to keep doing it. And it is.” Sometimes they don’t even need fresh inspiration. Chad keeps a vault—ideas from 12, 14, 15 years ago—waiting for the dust-off. One of the new album’s centerpieces, “Just to Get You Back,” came from 2007. No, it wasn’t directed at anyone in particular. “It was more like turning a cheesy pickup line into a melodic number,” Chad says.
For a band that spent its early years being compared to every plaid shirt on rock radio, they don’t really chase influences anymore. “We’re not looking around going, ‘Let’s make this sound like someone else,’” Chad says. “The second I start singing, it’s gonna be a Nickelback song.” He’s not wrong. There’s an ironclad DNA in that voice—any song becomes a Kroeger song the moment he rasps into the mic.
But Get Rollin’ arrives heavier than expected, at least to listeners who stopped checking in after “Rockstar.” “People said ‘San Quentin’ is the heaviest thing we’ve ever done,” Ryan laughs. “Really? Okay. That’s an opportunity.” Cue the playlists: Nickelback: Heavy Side, Lighter Side, and—because of course—Other Side for the deep-cut hounds. Chad insists they’ve gone heavier before—go revisit “This Means War” if you need convincing—but he’s happy to let the internet think they’ve suddenly discovered distortion.
Maybe it hits harder simply because rock isn’t dominating pop culture the way it once did. Chad admits as much. “It used to be every day we’d hear heavy music on popular radio,” he says. “I’m not one of those ‘rock is dead’ guys—it's dumb—but you just don’t hear it as much anymore.” Ryan agrees: things are cyclical, hip-hop’s long reign is easing, and younger listeners are wandering back toward guitars like they’re thrift-store treasures.
The question of rock’s danger—whether it still has any—lands with the energy of two guys remembering high school. Chad name-checks Two Live Crew as the real threat of his youth, which probably tells you everything about Hannah, Alberta. Chad’s danger metric, however, skews more follicular: “The length of your hair was far more dangerous. If you found yourself in a country bar with long hair, you'd just get your ass kicked.”
Nostalgia, though—that’s the beast they can still weaponize. “Those Days,” the record’s full-blown Gen X memory bomb, started with Chad throwing out, “Remember when the streetlights came on and we had to be home,” and everyone in the room immediately agreeing that, yes, that’s the first line. Then came Elm Street, BMX bikes, skateboards, VHS players, and the eternal shame of being a Beta household. By the time they got to star-69, the song had basically written itself.
They know exactly what they’re doing. “Music is the closest thing we have to a time machine,” Chad says. For the record, he’d absolutely hop in the time machine, provided he gets to bring the cheat codes. Ryan’s more hesitant. “You can never really go home,” he says. Chad barrels through anyway: “Why not? Let’s ruin it!”
The irony of all this nostalgia talk is that Nickelback themselves have become nostalgic. Two decades after “Leader of Men,” they’re now the soundtrack people remember from their own formative chaos. And Chad knows it. “That’s what keeps the fire alive,” he says. “Songs like that—they get you close to those moments again.”
Time machines, tidal waves, ruined innocence—after ten albums, Nickelback still leans into all of it with the enthusiasm of teenagers who just discovered AC/DC. And maybe that's the real secret to longevity: they still want to be there, volume on ten, painting the walls bright yellow even when someone tells them it’s too much.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
