NICKELBACK’s CHAD KROEGER And RYAN PEAKE Open Up About ‘Heavy’ New Single ‘San Quentin’, Upcoming Studio Album

Guitarist Ryan Peake and guitarist/vocalist Chad Kroeger of Canadian rockers NICKELBACK spoke to Robyn Lane of the WRAT radio station about the band’s upcoming tenth studio album, which is due in November. Regarding why it took so long to produce the follow-up to 2017’s “Feed The Machine”, Chad said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “Well, we should have been making a record a lot sooner, with all that time off [due to the coronavirus pandemic]. But it’s weird to say this, but for 25 years it feels like someone’s been standing behind us with a cattle prod and telling us, ‘Hey, the record’s gotta be done at this time. We’re gonna tour at this time. We’re gonna do Australia and then we’re gonna go do Europe and then we’re gonna come back. We’ll go across Canada. We’ll hit America.’ Just like every other band that has to do this stuff, you wanna get a chance to see your fans all around the world. But with this, we were, like, ‘We’ll get to it when we get to it.’ [Laughs] And yeah, we took our time with it, which was just a wonderful luxury, to be able to sit back and [go], ‘No. I’m gonna play this guitar solo 40 more times for another three days and make sure it’s just exactly how we want it as opposed to deadline, deadline, deadline.”

In recent weeks, NICKELBACK has been teasing a new single, “San Quentin”, which will arrive on September 7. Asked about some fans’ initial reaction that the 10-second clip is trailering what sounds on initial listen like the heaviest song the band has ever written and unlike anything NICKELBACK has done before, Ryan said: “It’s funny. We’ve been hearing that quite a bit. It’s actually interesting because I think NICKELBACK fans would know for sure [that it’s us once they heard the full song]. I don’t think it’s unusual… It’s a heavy rock song, and if you’ve seen us live, you would definitely get it. But I kind of like that people are feeling like it’s a surprise that we can have rock songs like that in the repertoire.”