My friend Ken and I decided to listen to an album every day this year. Each week is themed. At the end of each week, we rank what we listened to. To be clear, we aren’t ranking every album that fits the theme. We are only ranking what we chose to listen to during the last seven days.
This week’s theme is “butt rock,” meaning post-grunge from the late 1990s or early 2000s. “Butt rock,” of course, is a derisive moniker. The term allegedly emerged from radio stations whose slogan was some variant of “Nothing but rock.” Haters then added a “t” and ran with it. But Ken and I are not going in with a bad attitude. Are we listening to nothing but rock this week? Yes. But we’ll only double that last “t” when it’s actually necessary.
#7 Come Clean by Puddle of Mudd (2001)
There is a video of Puddle of Mudd covering Nirvana’s “About a Girl” that frequently goes viral because it is unlistenable. I try not to judge poor live performances too harshly. Even the greatest artists have a bad day. I sadly can’t give Puddle of Mudd the benefit of the doubt, though. Their studio album Come Clean doesn’t reflect much more positively on the group.
Come Clean wants to be Nirvana’s Nevermind. But whereas stripping the crunch out of the guitars on a Nirvana song reveals deft songwriting and singable melodies (e.g., “Come as You Are”), there is nothing to the compositions on Come Clean. They are pure dreck.
Except for “She Hates Me.” Amid this puddle of garbage, “She Hates Me” rises to the surface. It’s the only song on the album that approaches Nirvana’s trademarked soft-loud dynamic (e.g., “Smells Like Teen Spirit”) with anything close to the level of skill of the Seattle trio.
#6 Disclaimer by Seether (2002)
There is no band this week that seemed more confused than Seether. On Disclaimer, they would move between Pantera-style riffs (e.g., “Pride”) and Lifehouse-style ballads (e.g., “Sympathetic”) without a warning. Transitions like this aren’t necessarily a problem. But Seether doesn’t seem completely at ease in either style.
Furthermore, their lyrics are manly in a way that borders between grotesque and performative. On “Gasoline,” they snarl, “Wanna waste her monthly blood / Wanna get some on my love.” On the aforementioned “Pride,” they growl, “Take it, break it, rape it, forsake it.” On “F**k It,” they scream the explicit title repeatedly.
Even when they get more introspective on something like their platinum single “Fine Again” (i.e., “They say it’s over, I’m fine again, yeah / Try to stay sober, feels like I’m dying here”), I continue to find it hard to buy in.
#5 Extreme Behavior by Hinder (2005)
From Elvis Presley’s gyrating hips being censored on The Ed Sullivan Show to Mötley Crüe’s ode to all things women, rock music has always been a horny genre. That said, if you were to give every rock subgenre a horniness rating, grunge would be relatively low on the list. Post-grunge, butt rock, or however you’d like to refer to it, is a different story. This is a horny genre.
You get some of that horniess on Hinder’s Extreme Behavior. On “Get Stoned,” for example, the Oklahoma City quartet sings the following:
Cause the sex is so much better when you’re mad at me
You wear me out
But it’s all right now
Without a doubt
Oh, the breakup’s worth the makeup sex you’re giving me
Extreme Behavior is not packed with horniness like some other albums on this list, though. Nearly every track captures a man unable to get over a break-up. “Lips of an Angel,” the biggest hit on the record, is a great example of this: “Well, my girl’s in the next room / Sometimes I wish she was you.”
The prevalence of the down bad anthem across this album—and this genre generally—is why critics also refer to it as “divorced dad rock.” “Divorced Dad Rock,” Esquire wrote in 2025, “rejects the concept of joy so completely that about 40 percent of it should come with a self-harm content warning.” Extreme Behavior surely should come with a warning.
#4 Sunburn by Fuel (1998)
When Consequence of Sound ranked the best post-grunge songs in 2024, the top five was packed with the biggest artists of the genre, including Nickelback, Creed, and 3 Doors Down. But among those post-grunge crowd-pleasers was another group: Fuel.
Fuel’s Sunburn is not an obscure record. It sold a million copies in 1998. And the lead single, “Shimmer,” was a minor chart hit. But I don’t think it sits as well in the public’s memory as some other records from that list. That’s a shame. Sunburn was arguably the most interesting record musically this week.
#3 15 by Buckcherry (2005)
If you were to ask me what my favorite song on each of these records was, it was consistently whatever the most popular song was. That’s why I was nervous to listen to 15 by Buckcherry. By Spotify streams, “Crazy Bitch” was the most popular song on this record. I don’t like “Crazy Bitch.” It’s got all of the silly, horny, machismo that defines many songs in this genre (i.e., “And now you got to freak me out / Scream so loud, getting fuckin' laid”). Lucky for me, this record has a bit more going on than “Crazy Bitch.” It even has a bit more going on than “Sorry,” the big power ballad that got a lot of radio play in 2005.
15 is a fun record. It’s got bits of country flair on songs like “Brooklyn” and “Carousel.” It’s got flying-down-the-highway hard rock on songs like “Next 2 You” and “Broken Glass.” And, of course, it’s got some hall-of-fame butt rock moments on songs like “Everything” and “Out of Line.”
I never thought I would be saying this coming into this week, but put your feelings about “Crazy Bitch” and “Sorry” and Buckcherry aside and give the rest of 15 a chance.
#2 Human Clay by Creed (1999)
If Puddle of Mudd is descended from Nirvana, then Creed is of Pearl Jam’s lineage. The Nirvana-Pearl Jam dichotomy—which I alluded to when writing about Pearl Jam’s Ten a few months ago—illustrates the sonic diversity of groups that we apply the “grunge” moniker to. Beyond geography, Nirvana and Pearl Jam don’t have a ton in common. Puddle of Mudd and Creed don’t even have that. It honestly feels strange to lump them in the same genre.
Creed often does not rock as hard as the other groups on the list. Scott Stapp’s Eddie-Vedder-esque warble just lends itself nice to a ballad. They’re also the most likely to sing about Jesus, a foreign concept in the butt rock universe.
Despite your feelings about Scott Stapp’s enunciation or Jesus’s Annunciation, you’ve got to appreciate Creed for one thing: They go for it. “Higher,” maybe the most famous song in the butt rock universe, is a great example of this. This is a band bearing it all. It gives me the exact opposite feeling for how Seether makes you feel. That was an act. This is reality.
#1 All the Right Reasons by Nickelback (2005)
My favorite quote about Nickelback comes directly from the mouth of frontman Chad Kroeger as quoted in Fred Bronson’s indispensable The Billboard Book of Number One Hits. In fact, I like it so much that I quoted it while writing about the Canadian group’s “How You Remind Me” in my book:
There are two types of bands that get signed. There’s the kind that has a buzz and you’ve got fifteen different labels with deals on the table, or else you have to sell so many records on your own that it doesn’t matter if you’re four monkeys farting into a box . . . so we tried to be the four monkeys.
Of course, this is a hilarious quote, especially if you are among the large contingent of Nickelback haters. But I also hope Chad Kroeger gives himself more credit. Yes, there is cheesy imagery on these songs (e.g., “Photograph”). Yes, there are the ridiculous macho lyrics (e.g., “But I got both hands on the wheel while you got both hands on my gears”). But Nickelback knows how to craft a song.
“Far Away,” for example, could very well have been a cut on the first Taylor Swift record. “Rockstar” has more humor and self-awareness than nearly every other song we heard this week (i.e., “Get washed-up singers writing all my songs, and / Lip sync ‘em every night, so I don’t get ‘em wrong”). Will I be actively listening to Nickelback after this week? Probably not. But I do tip my cap to them.
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Nickelback gets so much shit for being safe and boring but when the alternative is Seether I pick nickelback any day of the week