Five years after Feed the Machine, Nickelback is back today with its 10th studio album, Get Rollin'. The 11-song set was produced by the band with longtime collaborator Chris Baseford and was preceded by the single “San Quentin,” which is the quartet's 20th Top 10 single on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart.
Nickelback toured to promote Feed the Machine and rather than make a new album had decided to put together 2020 tour celebrating the 15th anniversary of its Diamond-certified album All the Right Reasons. The idea was scuttled by the pandemic, and bassist Mike Kroeger tells us that Nickelback gradually worked its way back to a new album during the interim: “When the Earth stopped spinning we had to consider other things, and we thought about moving it the tour forward a year and that looked like pretty much a pie in the sky idea. So we decided to box it up and wait and see, and then so much time passed that it was necessary to make a new album. I guess instead of celebrating the 15th anniversary of All the Right Reasons we'll wait 'til 20, I dunno.”
Frontman Chad Kroeger, who wrote or co-wrote all of the songs, tells us that Get Rollin' was put together gradually at different writing and recording sessions rather than in one fell swoop: “At no point in time did we say, “let's make an album.' It was, 'Might as well go in the studio again'…There wasn't this concerted effort to make an album. It was just creativity just sort of creep along, and before we knew it we had enough songs for an album. We sort of looked around and, 'Well, there's a body of work here. We should probably think about releasing a record.'”
Kroeger adds that “San Quentin,” inspired by his own visit to the famed state prison in Marin County, Calif., was one of the tracks on the album that took Nickelback the longest to complete: “The slowest climber had to have been 'San Quentin' because the guitar riff was there, and I just went, 'Can somebody please keep me the hell out of San Quentin,' and that was the only thing that was on there. And I'd listen to it once in awhile… So, I mean…it probably took a year and a half to finish that song. It was like, 'Oh, now we need a guitar solo. It's gonna be another couple months here.' But it was nice. It was great to be able to sit back and listen to it and make sure we went in the direction we wanted to go.”
Nickelback is currently planning a tour the band members expect to start around June of 2023.
The track listing for Get Rollin' includes:
San Quentin
Skinny Little Missy
Those Days
High Time
Vegas Bomb
Tidal Wave
Does Heaven Even Know You're Missing
Steel Still Rusts
Horizon
Standing in the Dark
Just One More