Set aside your music snobbery and forget the memes – Nickelback are actually good

Photograph: Sean Kilpatrick/AP

For nearly 30 years, we’ve been living a lie. Too eager for the approval of others, too scared of being mocked, to own what we know to be true. It’s time we freed ourselves from this prison we’ve built around ourselves and finally admitted it: Nickelback are good.

The idea that consuming media is for fun as opposed to signalling some unearned superiority over others is an idea that many people are still getting used to. But this is how most people have always approached their TV, their movies and their music – and it’s why Nickelback, Creed, Lifehouse and every other 90s-era nu metal band featuring frontmen with soul patches making that “mmyerrrrh” sound are beginning to enjoy a critical revival.

If you’re anywhere from 25 to 50, your first reaction to reading that is probably something like “ugh”. Since the internet’s pre-YouTube days, Nickelback have been music’s biggest punchline. Nickelback jokes and memes were a huge feature of those few precious years when Facebook, Twitter and Reddit were genuinely fun and interesting places to spend time online.

In the cold and unforgiving light of 2024, the trope has aged like milk. Alongside “why are the Kardashians famous”, “I like all music except rap and country” and “sportsball”, “Nickelback sucks” has been conversational styrofoam for the last 15 years. It’s so stale that the Queensland police service still wheels it out when its social media team is trying to be relatable.

Besides being a hangover from the era when irony and snark were the internet’s currencies of choice, the Nickelback snobbery has always had a classist element to it. The Canadian four-piece have always worn their rural Albertan roots on their denim sleeves. For a long time, looking down one’s nose at Nickelback was the lazy person’s way of signalling that they had “good taste”.

But so-called “bad taste” media has a big advantage over the more highbrow stuff: it’s a lot more fun. Covid reminded us that consuming movies, TV and music we actually enjoy is often more rewarding than diligently bingeing the latest critical darling to keep up with some imagined idea of cultural importance.

The soundtrack to the first season of Netflix smash Beef is filled with tunes from Incubus, Bush, Limp Bizkit and the gloriously named Hoobastank. Greta Gerwig and Ryan Gosling did the Lord’s work by making Matchbox Twenty’s 1996 hit Push the heart and soul of Barbie.

For a band who became the face of bland car-commercial rock, Nickelback could hit you with some deeply affecting music. Never Again, the third single off their 2001 album Silver Side Up, is told from the perspective of a child whose father is violent and abusive.

The Nickelback frontman, Chad Kroeger, based the song on his own childhood watching his mother’s abuse at his father’s hands; the original music video included statistics of domestic violence rates. Listening to it at the age of 10, it was the first piece of media I encountered that made me think about domestic violence as a concept.

Photograph, the lead single from 2005’s All the Right Reasons, also has a place in my heart despite being the internet’s favourite punching bag for most of the late aughts. Their most autobiographical song, Photograph is an ode to growing up in a small town, moving away and never fully reconciling the desire to get out with the loneliness of leaving your roots.

The photograph of the song’s title, which became a meme in itself, is an artefact of Kroeger’s upbringing; it shows a young Kroeger and childhood friend Joey Moi, who would later become the band’s producer. For me, growing up in a midsized regional town about which I still have strong and conflicting feelings, a line like “I miss it now/I can’t believe it/So hard to stay/Too hard to leave it” affects me more than I care to admit.

So at your next karaoke night, put How You Remind Me on and see how long it takes for people to stop pretending they don’t know the words. If you’re willing to put aside decades of learned snobbery and let your mullet down, Nickelback can show you a good time too.