Chad Kroeger has said he thinks that Nickelback aren’t as hated nowadays as they used to be.
Kroeger made the revelation on a recent appearance on Arizona’s KFMA-FM radio station when he was asked why he thinks so many people enjoy hating on his band.
“That kind of used to be a thing. I shouldn’t say ‘that kind of used to be’ — that was definitely a thing for a long time,” he said [via Blabbermouth].
“And I think there’s been a softening — there really has, thankfully. I’m not sure if it’s because we receive a ton of love on TikTok or whatever the hell it is, but for whatever reason the teeth have kind of been removed. It’s really nice to not be Public Enemy Number One.”
Nickelback’s song ‘She Keeps Me Up’ went viral on TikTok last year, with thousands of fans making ‘thirst traps’ to the song.
Kroeger also suggested he thought some of the flak Nickelback has received has been because their music has been overplayed.
“I think that with the range of songs that we write — from rock to all the softer, melodic stuff, all the way down to… Well, I know that ‘Far Away’ got played on country stations even and I know that ‘Rockstar’ — the heavily redacted version — got played on CMT,” he said.
“So when you’re going that far and the scope is that wide, it makes it tough to get away from the band if you’re not into the band. And if you’re trying to switch the radio station three times, and it’s just, like, ‘Ah, there they are. There’s their rock song on the rock station. There’s their pop song on the pop station. And oh my God, I can’t even go to the country station and get away from these guys.’
“That type of oversaturation could piss people off. But at the end of the day, we’re just a band that makes music.”
He concluded: “I can’t stand a couple of bands, but I don’t go online and turn into a keyboard warrior and just start hating on them. I just change the channel or I put on something that I wanna listen to.”
Despite this, Kroeger has taken the band’s reputation in its stride. Last year, just as they were about to release their latest album ‘Get Rollin’, he joked that he was “ready for the world to hate us again”.