Nickelback – Leave Me Behind

Twenty-one years after “Rockstar,” Nickelback finally have a diamond single, and a ballad out ahead of an album that lands October 30.

On September 4, 2026, the RIAA certified Rockstar twelve times platinum, and in the same stroke made a song from 2005 the first Nickelback single to reach diamond status in the United States. The same round of certifications moved How You Remind Me to nine times platinum, Far Away to five, and Photograph, Savin’ Me, Animals and If Today Was Your Last Day to four apiece. Eleven days later the band released a video for a song three weeks old, from a record that will not be in stores until the end of October.

Keep watching: Nickelback – Rattle The Cage · explore more →

That song is Leave Me Behind, which the band issued on August 21, 2026 as the third single from Everything Under The Sun. Virgin Music Group releases the album on October 30, Nickelback’s eleventh and their first since Get Rollin’ in 2022, as well as their first outside BMG after two records there. The single follows Rattle The Cage, the John 5 collaboration that opened the campaign in July, and Bones For The Crows, which first appeared in 2023 on a mobile game soundtrack before the band folded it into the album. Chad Kroeger has said the record carries “every side of the band,” and the three advance tracks were sequenced to prove it rather than to establish a direction.

Where Rattle The Cage is riff and volume, this one is a power ballad, and its subject is narrower than the usual big-chorus consolation. The song sits with somebody carrying another person through a bad stretch, and with the fear underneath that job: that being needed is temporary, and that the person who heals might walk on without you. Kroeger has described the tension between the two impulses as the thing that made the song feel personal to write. It is the oldest trick in the Nickelback playbook, a plain emotional situation stated in plain language, and it is also the reason the band’s ballads have always outlived the reviews.

The song came first, the pictures came later

The August release shipped with a lyric video and nothing more. Timothy Hiehle, who also directed the band’s High Time clip, handled the proper video, which the band premiered on September 15, 2026 and which runs just under four minutes. Holding the visual back four weeks is ordinary campaign management for a record still more than a month out. What is less ordinary is the size of the catalog sitting behind the release, and who owns it now.

In July 2026, bassist Mike Kroeger told Audacy that the band had sold roughly eighty percent of its catalog rights to an undisclosed partner a couple of years earlier, and that he was happy with how the process went. Slipknot, Deftones and the Red Hot Chili Peppers have all made versions of the same deal in the past two years. The sale lands in the middle of the most flattering stretch Nickelback have had in a decade. The Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences inducted them into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in Edmonton on March 13, 2023. The documentary Hate to Love: Nickelback did the work no press cycle had managed and made the hostility itself the story. The Get Rollin’ tour sold faster and drew more people than anything else in their history.

All of which means the certifications the RIAA handed out in September are a receipt for a stretch of work that ran from 2001 to 2009 and is now, in large part, somebody else’s asset. Leave Me Behind is the other column. It is three minutes and forty-eight seconds of new material from a band whose past has already been counted, valued and sold, and who keep turning up to add to it anyway. The album arrives October 30. The song is the argument for showing up to hear it.