They are the eternal divisive rock band like marmite for your ears. Some people love them and others, well, seem to have a quite unrivalled and insatiable hatred. We’re very firmly in the former camp and don’t get the Nickelback hatred. It’s become something of a bandwagon but what is there to hate when you break it down?
Bone rattling riffs? Check.
Heavier songs than you imagined? Check.
Melodic singalongs? Check.
Sold out shows around the world? Check.
They are one of the most commercially viable and successful acts of the 2000s, selling more than 50 million records. Behind only The Beatles, they’re the second best-selling foreign act in the US……EVER.
But despite all this, Nickelback split the rock and metal family quicker than Cristiano Ronaldo cracked the hearts of Manchester United fans. The Canadian rockers are back with their tenth slice of ass bootin’, head flingin’, and foot stompin’ rock n’ roll, and Get Rollin’ is another nail in the coffin for their detractors.
After three full runs through the album, Get Rollin’ is a really good record and built upon the foundation stones of ferocious energy, ear worms and stellar songwriting. It’s their first album since 2017 and opener San Quentin bursts forth like a ravenous musical animal. It’s cranked up to 11, but it hits all the right notes and sets the tone from the off.
It’s immediately in their top ten songs of all time for our money, and you know what you’re getting when you hit the play button on a Nickelback record. They know what they are good at and they do it bloody better than most. The pace slows for the next song, Those Days, which is a nostalgic and melodic track sung expertly by main man Chad Kroeger, who is of course no stranger to ballads which hit the feels. After all, How You Remind Me was Billboard’s Top Rock Song of the 00’s.
Steel Still Rusts is a song about the band’s first bodyguard, as Kroeger reveals it was inspired from his stories about being in conflict overseas and missing the birth of his children. Another of the highlights on the album is Skinny Little Missy, a song we were still singing and had burrowed in our subconscious long after the album had stopped playing. And terrible song title aside, it’s a total banger.
Just One More brings the curtain down on a record which hits all the right notes for fans of the band. For people who don’t like them, well they won’t like this anyway. But with 23 chart-topping singles and 12 consecutive sold-out world tours performed in front of nearly 10 million diehard fans around the planet, Kroeger and co won’t care.
We’d recommend you park your reservations, plug in your ear buds and give this a whirl. It’ll brighten up your day, it’ll get your foot stompin’ a mud hole in the ground with some of the riffs and it might, just might, convert you to the Nickelback family.
7/10
Standout Tracks: San Quentin, Skinny Little Missy
For Fans Of: 3 Doors Down, Collective Soul, Creed, Three Days Grace, Theory of a Deadman, Buckcherry
Written by: Eric Mackinnon
