Nickelback released Get Rollin' on November 18, 2022, through BMG. Their tenth studio album followed 2017’s Feed the Machine, pairing the heavy opening track “San Quentin” with songs about youth, relationships and life after military service. The lead single’s prison-break story started with an unlikely encounter: Chad Kroeger meeting a warden from the California prison.
That meeting gave Kroeger the title before he had a finished song. He told WRAT that he saved the idea in his phone, then developed the lyric after the guitar riff took shape. The finished song put him in the role of someone trying to escape, using the real encounter as the starting point for a fictional story.
The band had given themselves time to follow those different ideas. “We didn’t have a deadline,” Kroeger told SOCAN’s Words & Music. After years of recording schedules tied to touring plans, they could work when inspiration arrived. Kroeger developed initial song ideas in his home studio, then brought them to his bandmates for a decision. They could reject something even if they liked it as a song; the question was whether it belonged on a Nickelback record.
In a December 2022 interview with NME, Kroeger described escapism as a goal for the album. Recorded during lockdown at his home studio, it pursued a more relaxed mood than Feed the Machine. That willingness to consider different directions mattered when “Tidal Wave” arrived late in the process. Guitarist Ryan Peake welcomed how far the song departed from their familiar sound. Its melodic approach accompanied a lyric that compared the rush of love to a wave, something powerful to enjoy while it lasted. Peake credited the audience’s openness with giving the band room to experiment. “High Time” took another route, beginning with the sound of a van starting and moving into a blend of country and rock rooted in the 1970s.
“Those Days” made the backward glance more personal. Kroeger explained to SOCAN that getting older had changed the way he thought about youth: difficult experiences remained part of his story, but good memories had become more valuable. The song reminded him why they had started the band, and he wanted to write about that feeling.
Other memories carried a different weight. Working again with producer Chris Baseford, Nickelback included “Steel Still Rusts,” a song rooted in what their first bodyguard had told them about military service. Kroeger told Billboard that the man had described overseas conflict, missing his children’s births and struggling to obtain help after returning home. One account stayed with him: standing in an American city in fatigues, with desert sand still on his boots, while ordinary civilian life continued around him. That detail gave the song a specific human starting point. The subject sat alongside the album’s relationship writing, including “Horizon,” which Kroeger described as coming from the uncertainty of wanting a friendship to become something more.
The original release reached listeners on CD and digital services, with an eleven-song standard edition and a deluxe version adding four acoustic recordings. Its chart debut included No. 2 on Billboard’s Top Hard Rock Albums chart and No. 30 on the Billboard 200. In Switzerland, Get Rollin' became Nickelback’s first No. 1 album.
