Love to Hate: Is Benson Boone the New Nickelback?

In their review of American Heart, the second studio album by singer Benson Boone, Pitchfork spared no insult. Describing his music as ‘best suited to middle school sleepovers’ and ‘an invasive species in the garden of good taste’, the review offers a damning description of Boone’s discography: it’s ‘music for people who like how music sounds, but not for people who like music.’ Citing the involvement of Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker on the album, the critic ponders, ‘I wonder if Parker is haunted by the bouncy bassline of Boone’s “Mystical Magical,” not unlike how J. Robert Oppenheimer is haunted by his actions.’ Not gonna lie: I cackled.

Boone is a young former Mormon who appeared on American Idol then found TikTok fame and was soon headhunted for chart success by Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds. He opened for Taylor Swift on one night of her Eras Tour. He played two shows at Coachella, one of which featured Queen guitarist Brian May. He was on SNL and was nominated for Best New Artist at the Grammys (he lost to Chappell Roan.) He seems like a perfectly decent guy who is very good at backflips and writes songs I personally do not like. And right now, people f*cking love ragging on this dude. He is our new singer whom we love to hate. In an era of TikTok, sponcon, and ‘culture wars’, this 23-year-old in a sparkly jumpsuit is the newly ordained punching bag of pop. Bless him, for this is a title nobody wants, and honestly, it’s one I thought we’d largely moved past as a culture. Perhaps Canada’s favourite grunt rockers could offer him a few tips.

I’ve seen Boone be compared to Nickelback a lot lately, both musically and in terms of the cultural response to their sound and visuals. People don’t like Boone’s voice, much in the same way they groaned at Chad Kroeger’s. The lyrics are insipid, the musicality derivative, and there’s a distinct lack of that secret sauce one needs to stand out in the crowd. Yet they’re undeniable earworms that dominate your brains in spite of all efforts to delete them. If it’s possible to be both derivative and aggravating, then that might be the uniting factor in the love-to-hate genre.

Nickelback, at their peak, were utterly inescapable. You couldn’t turn on a pop or rock radio station without hearing several of their songs on repeat. Their third album, Silver Side Up, went six times platinum in America and has sold 5.6 million copies by 2010 (not bad given that its release date was September 11, 2001.) Chad Kroeger admitted that the album’s lead single, ‘How You Remind Me’, was the result of him trying to make a commercial hit, and he more than surpassed his grandest expectations. But by the beginning of the new decade, the band had become a meme, the exemplification of ‘the worst band ever.’

In May 2013, the readers of Rolling Stone named Nickelback the second-worst band of the 1990s, behind only Creed (who, for the record, I think are way worse than Nickelback.) They were seen as irritating, uninteresting, impossible to ignore but not worth the attention. All the people you thought were uncool listened to Nickelback instead of ‘real rock.’ Kroeger’s voice faced a lot of pushback. They were trying too hard to be popular. As rock radio stations died off during the 2000s and the genre’s chart appeal began to wane, it felt easy to call out Nickelback for killing off their contemporaries, a few exceptions like the Foo Fighters aside.

Hating can be fun. We’re not supposed to admit that, but then we read a devastatingly funny takedown of an artist we don’t like and suddenly we’re cheering them on like ice hockey goons mid-fight. It can be therapeutic to snark on an easy or deserving target, whether it’s Elon Musk’s inability to tell a joke or Robin Thicke making an album to try and publicly coax his ex-wife into a reconciliation. You want bad things to happen to them and nobody else. We’ve all been there. The concept of someone or something that we love to hate is a potent part of the true hater’s code. There’s joy to be mined in mocking something so undeniably awful that you bypass the fury and go straight to entertainment. We discussed this earlier this week with And Just Like That…, a show that seems to only exist so that we as a species can unite around a common enemy in times of strife.

There’s a wide appeal to Boone, not unlike Nickelback, whose fans stretched across the radio-listening demos. But Boone is of the TikTok generation, where anodyne universality is both a gift and a curse. The algorithm will prize you, but then it’ll force you into the eyeballs of a ton of people wondering why you’re there in the first place. That organic spark of hype is quickly replaced with a repetitive grind as you’re beaten into the ground by overplay and corporate hijacking. Boone’s music has that corporate-friendly quality, like it was designed to score ads for iPhones and Hondas. It’s general in its lyricism and broad in emotion. But he’s also a straight guy who doesn’t mind sparkling it up with a flashy outfit. It’s a stylistic choice that has seen him be unfavourably compared to Harry Styles, another solo artist who plays around with androgynous fashion but whose songs are more critically accepted. Love-to-hate targets are often seen as the ‘we have them at home’ version of the real thing.

There’s a popular argument that most popular things are bad, or at the very least derivative. Capitalism exists not because of true innovation but because of exploitation and appropriation. It worked once so it has to work a hundred times more. Reboot, remake, reimagine, and continue until the horse has been flogged to ashes. There’s obvious truth to this assertion, although there are certainly many counter-examples across pop culture in 2025, and in particular music. Nostalgic reinvention can prove inventive too, as artists like Beyoncé, Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter, and Kesha combine past and present with sly and interrogative stances on what came before them. Benson is doing none of that, obviously. He’s there to remain stridently middle of the road.

So, why hate him so much? Do we just need an easy target to rally around while the world sets itself on fire repeatedly? We haven’t really had a universal target of musical derision since Nickelback, at least not with the same level of consistency in terms of the ‘insults to popularity’ ratio. Imagine Dragons kind of filled the gap for a bit, but never with the same level of ire. Ed Sheeran was too dull for the job. All the most recent targets of ‘industry plant’ claims were women with interesting musical flair and images who were attacked largely for reasons of sexism or snobbery (Chappell Roan, Clairo, Doechii).

But then there’s Benson Boone, the former-Mormon talent-show contestant who tops the charts and is suddenly inescapable, all while the surrounding discourse seems baffled and irritated by his speedy popularity. In his annual worst-of videos, YouTube music critic Todd in the Shadows talks about how he’s more offended by blandness than aggravation. At least the latter elicits some kind of feeling like you’ve totally wasted your time. Boone doesn’t have the swagger to pull off a lot of his retro stylings, even if his voice is impressive, and when his work veers from dull to annoying, you’re either with it or you’re not. And hoo boy, a lot of people are not.

Do we even need to detail the ways in which the love-to-hate bandwagon, the backlash to it, and the backlash to that unfold, and how it’ll inevitably happen with Boone? We know how this goes. It’s as regular as clockwork. Boone himself is aware that he’s viewed as a one-hit wonder and backflipping gimmick, something he made fun of in a recent music video. Perhaps being in on the joke can shield him from some of the more caustic backlash.

The Nickelbacklash is thoroughly over, largely because the band stopped being ubiquitous and it was far easier to ignore them. But there was also a general understanding that the hate was both overblown and needlessly personal. Chad Kroeger in particular faced the brunt of the mockery, including in one instance having rocks thrown at his head during a concert. Key endorsements from the likes of Lizzo and the cultural embrace of 2000s butt rock and nu-metal gave them some cred. Nowadays, they’re just chugging along as a big touring act with minimal impact on the charts, which is also a fate a lot of rock has faced in 2025. They are pretty basic. I saw the documentary made about the band, Nickelback: Hate to Love, hoping for some clarity on their feelings as pop culture enemy number one. Alas, they were hesitant to fully confront this unique cultural experience.

What could change things for Boone is if he’s able to prove himself as a more ambitious and daring artist than his current output suggests. Poptimism is crying out for some more men on the frontlines. But if this is it, if this is all that Benson Boone is, then he won’t be a hated focus for too long. There will always be a replacement down the line, probably going viral in a TikTok dance. Sooner or later, a singer will be able to do three backflips in a row. Maybe that was Chad Kroeger’s real problem. Besides, people still like listening to Nickelback, and they’ll still enjoy listening to Benson Boone. There’s a lot of music out there. You can’t hate it all.