Here’s why people have loved to hate Nickelback over the years

Nickelback came out with their 10th studio album, Get Rollin’, November 2022.

While the rock band has enjoyed its success over the years, they have unfortunately also been the musical band the people loved to hate for reasons no one knows exactly. Despite this, the band has been inducted in the Canadian Music Hall of Fame as well.

While promoting their new album, the band opened up about the hate that received over the years and how have responded to it.

According to People, it was when How You Remind Me went on to become the most played radio song of the 2000s, which the band soon would find out was a double-edged sword.

“When the video for How You Remind Me came out, it was absolutely everywhere,” shared Kroeger in an online interview with the outlet. “I think everyone knew what I looked like. I had the long hair and the goatee, so I was pretty recognisable.”

“That song was — I'll never say it's a curse, because it absolutely was not that, but I guess the curse is that when people like something so much, they'll want to play it all the time,” bandmate, Ryan Peake chimed in. “That song got played so g-------n much that it became a thing you couldn't get away from. If that was part of the pushback, I understand that, but when you put a song out there, it's in somebody else's hands to do what they do.”

The outlet detailed the possible time when the public perception of the band began to inch towards dislike after a Comedy Central promo for Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn that ran on loop between 2002-2004. In it, comedian Brian Posehn makes a joke about a study tying violent lyrics to violent behaviour and says, "No one talks about the studies that show bad music makes people violent. Like, Nickelback makes me want to kill Nickelback.”

Then followed the meme galore that began after Nickelback released the video of their song Photograph from their diamond-certified album All the Right Reasons in 2005. There was a still of Kroeger holding up a photograph.

"There isn't anything in the world that can prepare you for fame," Kroeger said. "Fame is the weirdest thing."

Through the years, Nickelback has been a bit of a conundrum — as it became mainstream culturally to dislike them, they simultaneously racked up awards and became the best-selling foreign music group in the U.S. of the 2000s, behind only The Beatles.

"We're a band full of statistics," Kroeger quips. "Even though we've never been the critic's darlings and media's gone at us pretty hard, it's nice to still be able to look at each other and say, 'Well, every time we show up to a city someplace, people still want to see us play, and we still get to make records.'"

Previously, in an interview with Audacy when their album released, host Carlota mentioned to Kroeger and guitarist Ryan Peake that he expected the first single San Quentin to be in constant rotation on rock radio. Kroeger responded, “You know, we joke about it all the time. I’m like, ‘I’m ready for the world to hate us again.'”