Your Dumb Memes Revived One of Butt Rock's Biggest Bands

Creed is having a moment. Actually, if we’re being precise, it’s having innumerable moments, implicit and implicit again, each crossed the internet.

On Instagram, the set has been repurposed arsenic a comedic device for dunking connected President Joe Biden; connected TikTok, shitposters imagined what it would beryllium similar to explicate the butt stone legends to an alien race; and connected X, Creed is an casual punchline for commenting connected governmental theater. All the while, those memes are collectively accumulating millions of likes, views, and shares.

It’s harmless to accidental that if Charli XCX hadn’t already made 2024 a “brat summer,” past this—as acold arsenic memes are concerned—would beryllium Scott Stapp season. And Stapp, for his part, seems to beryllium afloat alert of it. “I’ve seen truthful galore [memes],” the Creed frontman says. “Some are hilarious and I find myself conscionable laughing, and immoderate are truly heartwarming successful presumption of however overmuch clip and vigor the instrumentality has enactment into creating the video.”

The wildest portion of each isn’t that Creed is being memed to death—it’s that the set is seemingly being memed backmost to life. In 2024, Creed softly clawed its mode backmost from net punchline to real, honest-to-god, record-selling stone band. By June, the set recovered itself backmost successful the charts—the apical 40 nary less. Last month, the band’s Greatest Hits was climbing successful sales.

As a effect of its unexpected resurgence, Creed is adjacent backmost touring, playing sold-out shows with chap postgrunge staples similar 3 Doors Down. On apical of that, they’re selling tickets for arena gigs for upwards of $100. For the ace Creed-core, there’s the band’s second-annual Miami-to-Nassau “Creed cruise” successful 2025, which lists top-tier tickets for an eye-watering $4,300. Those tickets, by the way, are sold out.

Sure, aged euphony finds caller audiences each the time, often with a bump from the internet—but Creed isn’t different bands. Creed is simply a set that hasn’t released a caller workplace medium successful 15 years and has spent astir of that decennary and a fractional arsenic the butt of net jokes. By manufacture standards, Creed was, astatine slightest until recently, six feet under.

“Back successful 2020, Creed hadn't toured since 2012, truthful we were benignant of intrigued, I deliberation would beryllium the word, to spot the involvement and to spot the songs having caller beingness and resurgence and renaissance,” says Creed’s agent, Ken Fermaglich, who has been with the set for decades.

All of that begs a mates evident questions: Why present and wherefore now?

According to YouTuber Pat Finnerty, whose transmission “What Makes This Song Stink” ritually roasts bands of Creed’s ilk, the equation for Creed’s comeback is simply a elemental one: clip + cringe = popularity.

Creed, Finnerty says, are present past the 20-year people aft which astir aged bands tin consciousness caller again. “But past there’s the meme thing—you spot each these memes of similar ‘this set sucks,’ but now, to usage the parlance of our time, ‘this set fucks,’” helium adds. “They’re switching it from ‘this set sucks’ to ‘this set fucks’ and it’s really funnier for them to get into it.”