Silver Side Up: Is Nickelback good, bad, or misunderstood?

If you search the term “defending Nickelback” on Google, you’ll get a host of responses and opinions across the spectrum. They tend to range from a perspective of “they’ve sold millions of albums, so they’re doing something right” to “Nickelback is everything I despise about mainstream post-grunge”. They’re so despised by some that dating profiles sometimes include some variation of the line “don’t swipe if you like Nickelback”. The true answer, though, lies somewhere in between.

It is indeed true that Nickelback are an extremely popular band. That’s not particularly up for debate, either. One of the biggest rock bands ever to come out of Canada (and one of a handful who are as big in the USA, if not bigger), they’ve sold over 50 million albums worldwide and routinely headline arenas. Regardless of the perceived quality of their music, that commercial success is indisputable. Tracks like “How You Remind Me” and “Someday” are still some of the biggest hits of the new millennium, a time where post-grunge was also starting to reach a commercial peak.

What is up for debate, of course, is the quality of their music. Certainly, the band has had a ton of recognizable hits, from 2001’s “How You Remind Me” to even more recent fare like “Gotta Be Somebody”. What ends up being the most criticized part of Nickelback’s catalogue is their penchant for two things: cheesy power ballads (hey, they sell!) and songs addled with awkward sexual metaphors. The latter also tends to contain, on a various sliding scale, lyrics of varying quality. Sometimes, like on “S.E.X.” (off their 2008 album Dark Horse), they’re abysmal to the point where they’re truly hard to defend listening to. There’s also “Figured You Out”, which, well, you probably don’t need to listen to. Please don’t. That’s not even counting songs like “Something In Your Mouth”, which leave little (okay, nothing) to the imagination.

Generally speaking, it’s the band’s hard rock tunes that are of a higher quality than the sex songs and power ballads. It was on 2017’s Feed The Machine that this all came to fruition. Easily the band’s best album by a country mile, it removed many of the band’s sex-addled songs and power ballads in favor of (mostly) hard rock. Considering the band have released many of those songs over the years (“Burn It To The Ground”, “Side Of A Bullet”) and they’ve also become fan favorites, it’s a wonder why they didn’t do this sooner. The answer is probably because the ballads and mid-tempo fare sell records, but that’s either here nor there.

Now, nobody is pretending Nickelback is a band looking to make highly artistic statements or anything like that. They’re certainly not looking to write 8-minute long progressive rock epics. However, when Nickelback focuses on the hard rock side of their sound, they’re sometimes pretty solid. At the very least, they’re well beyond the “worst rock band ever” status many like to give them.

Outside of perhaps Creed, U2, and Theory Of A Deadman, there aren’t too many bands that are more hated than Nickelback. A combination of commercial success and exposure to a wide audience ensures that popular bands like this will always have people that despise them (seriously, it even happens to influential bands like Radiohead), but perhaps Nickelback are a little too unfairly maligned. Considering the band is working on a new record as we speak, if the band doubles down on what made Feed The Machine their best album to date (more hard rock please, no awkward sexual metaphors), they might really be onto something. Or they could just release an album with two relatively heavy songs, 6 ballads, and 3 versions of “Figured You Out”. Only time will tell.