Meghan Simmons remembered Skillet’s music blasting through the old speakers on her church’s bus as it shuttled her and her youth group friends to concerts and camps in the mid-1990s. She recalled that the band—hard rock influenced by grunge, nu metal, and arena pop rock, with songs like “Locked in a Cage” and “Dive Over In”—scratched the itch of relatively tame teenage disenchantment.
“I wasn’t a particularly rebellious teenager, but that harder sound sort of gave me something to hook my rebellion onto,” Simmons said. “That was my edgy music.” When she saw Skillet at Winter Jam—a yearly Christian music tour that regularly ranks among the top-grossing tours in the US—it was “by far the hardest concert” she had ever attended. She watched the band play “with my high school boyfriend [now husband]. He bought me a smoothie.”
Long-time fans of Skillet know what to expect when they show up to a concert: pyrotechnics, bone-rattling amplification, and a theatrical performance of a range of selections from their expansive catalog, including intense, raucous anthems and inspirational ballads. After nearly 30 years in the industry, the band remains one of the most successful Christian music groups working today. In 2024, Skillet was the fourth most-streamed Christian artist according to Luminate, behind only Elevation Worship, Lauren Daigle, and Hillsong Worship.
And its success isn’t confined to Christian circles. According to the band’s public relations firm, the majority of Skillet’s radio airplay for the past decade has been on mainstream rock stations. They have 8.2 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Organizations like the WWE, ESPN, and the NFL have purchased sync rights for their songs. The band has toured with acts like Nickelback, Seether, Papa Roach, and Korn.
Unlike most of their industry counterparts that emerged on the contemporary Christian music (CCM) scene of the ’90s (think DC Talk and Jars of Clay), Skillet has continued to do the near impossible: attract new young fans. Today, their core audience demographic is men aged 18–24.
This kind of longevity and reach is rare, especially in Christian music, where catalogs have historically had little value (though that’s changed somewhat in recent years) and few artists have managed to establish their songs as classics. In Skillet’s case, long-term success seems to flow from periodic reinvention and marketing savvy. They stay busy, touring almost constantly. On the heels of their first Middle East tour last fall, the four-member ensemble, which includes John Cooper and his wife Korey Cooper, Jen Ledger, and Seth Morrison, is headlining Winter Jam once again. A fresh group of fans will rock out to their heavy sound—maybe even over smoothies.
Edginess, musical and rhetorical, has long been part of Skillet’s brand. Increasingly, it seems, that edginess is expressing itself through politics. Frontman John Cooper’s activism on stage, online, and on his podcast—related to gender, politics, and wokeness—has attracted listeners who share his conservative views. (The podcast’s most recent episode is in part a critical response to a recent article by Christianity Today’s editor in chief Russell Moore.)
Cooper seems to understand that the teens and young adults (especially men) of today are experiencing a different kind of alienation than he did—one marked by a feeling of collective powerlessness and political disenfranchisement. But the underlying rage, loneliness, and pain? Those are themes Skillet has always addressed.
“I have a perpetual love for teenagers,” he told CT. “We have to talk about nihilism and anger. I want them to know it’s okay to feel this way, but I also want them to know that there is hope.”
In Skillet’s early days, Cooper sported piecey bleached-blond hair (a striking contrast to his current dark hair and long beard) and a punk-inspired wardrobe (lots of black, cutoff tank tops, and baggy pants), in keeping with the band’s creative debt to ’90s acts like Nirvana. Cooper said the angst and disillusionment associated with figures like Kurt Cobain is part of Skillet’s story, too. Grunge and hard rock resonated with isolated teens like Cooper himself, who lost his mother to cancer when he was 15 years old.
“I started fighting with my dad. I was angry, and I was lonely,” Cooper said. “I would fantasize about hurting people. Nothing extreme, but I’d think, This person is hurting me. How can I hurt them?”
During that dark season, Cooper said, Jesus rescued him, and music was there for him. “It was like, ‘No one I know understands me, but Metallica does, Stryper does, Trent Reznor does,’” he said.
Skillet’s first album, Skillet (1996), paid homage to Nirvana’s 1991 album Nevermind; the title track, “I Can,” borrows structurally and sonically from “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” That grunge sound attracted Skillet’s early fans, mostly Christian teens and young adults looking for music that satisfied their desire for something cool and their parents’ search for “safe” content.
Skillet came out in the heyday of CCM’s bid to offer a Christian alternative to suit any musical taste: If you like NSYNC, try Plus One. If you like Alanis Morissette, try Rebecca St. James. These were artists for Christians who wanted a taste of what it would be like to be plugged into mainstream music subcultures—including their fandoms, concertgoing, and merch—but without sexual content, drug references, or explicit language.
Skillet took a slightly different approach. Josh Balogh, a writer for the Christian music forum Jesus Freak Hideout, said that though the band was always positioned as a Christian alternative to grunge, it also didn’t shy away from the dark content that defined the genre: “They were diving into mental health, suicidal ideation, really heavy themes.” Though their young Christian listeners might not have been allowed to listen to secular rock, they still resonated with the aesthetics of disillusionment and despair.
Andrew Czaplicki discovered Skillet in 1998 as a preteen at Creation Festival, a Christian music festival held in Pennsylvania from 1979 to 2023 that his parents made part of a family vacation. At the alternative “fringe” stage, he saw the band perform songs from their second album, Hey You, I Love Your Soul. Other Christian hitmakers like Audio Adrenaline played, too. But Czaplicki was an instant Skillet fan.
“I was an angsty kid, but my family had only ever listened to contemporary Christian music and country,” he said. “I felt like the world had just opened up to us, with all this new music we could listen to.” When Czaplicki was a lonely adolescent—his father was an active-duty service member, and his family moved every two years or so—listening to Skillet gave hard emotions a safe place to land.
Years later, during a family crisis, Czaplicki turned to the band’s music again. In 2018, he and his family were visiting grandparents over the Thanksgiving holiday. One morning, Czaplicki’s 18-month-old didn’t wake up. The unexpected death of their child left Czaplicki and his wife reeling. In the aftermath, Skillet’s music was like an old friend.
“There were days when their music got me through the day. Don’t get me wrong—God got me through it, but the music was the soundtrack,” said Czaplicki.
Skillet provided a place for his loneliness and sadness in adolescence. In adulthood, the raw, emotional, anthemic songs from the band’s 2016 album, Unleashed, resonated with him in the midst of mourning.
Now, Czaplicki and his 10-year-old son listen to Skillet together.
“I gave him an old iPod and loaded it up with Skillet songs so he can listen on the bus. He’s got the T-shirts. We go to concerts. It’s something we share now.”
Skillet’s appeal to the angry and angsty has continued to win it new fans and keep older fans coming back. The band has always adapted quickly to style changes in the industry, noted Balogh. And while Cooper insisted that Skillet doesn’t “chase trends,” he did acknowledge that they are always open to new sounds. Over the years, they’ve been influenced by Linkin Park, Breaking Benjamin, Imagine Dragons, Eminem, and Twenty-One Pilots.
They’re also open to cultural and political shifts. Veteran fans of Skillet have always seen the group as self-consciously countercultural. In the ’90s, their angst mirrored the grunge scene. Today, it mirrors the more online, “anti-woke” segment of American conservatism, which some young people see as the new counterculture.
Over the past decade, Cooper has become a vocal critic of the “deconstruction Christian movement.” In 2023, he self-published a book titled Wimpy, Weak, and Woke: How Truth Can Save America from Utopian Destruction. On his podcast, he calls out the “leftward drift of Christian elites.” The music video for the song “All That Matters” from the 2024 album Revolution features footage of him wearing a black cowboy hat. He sings, “These three things I’d die for: / my faith, my family, my freedom.” Cooper said listeners responded positively.
“All these fans are saying, ‘I’m just glad someone is saying it’s okay to love America,’” he said.
This anti-woke aesthetic seems to have particular appeal for young men. According to the music stats platform Chartmetric, Skillet’s audience is currently about 55 percent male (unusual in the Christian market), and nearly 45 percent of listeners are between the ages of 18 and 24. (By contrast, Elevation Worship, Lauren Daigle, and Hillsong Worship all have listenerships that are roughly 60 percent female or higher and primarily in the 25–34 age range.)
How Then Should Men Live?
Skillet seems to be attracting young people, said Cooper, because they are looking for “truth tellers”: “I would guess that a lot of the same people who listen to Joe Rogan and Bill Maher are also drawn to us. Skillet is extremely nonjudgmental.”
Cooper also said he still understands alienated youth, even though what it means to be alienated has changed since the ’90s. Skillet’s music and message is resonating. He thinks that’s confirmation the band is doing something right.
And what about all those non-Christian fans? To some degree, the lyrics of some of Skillet’s most popular songs (like “Monster,” used during the 2009 WrestleMania 25th Anniversary broadcast) are vague enough that listeners can “create their own meaning,” Balogh said. A generically uplifting faith message permeates the music—but it wouldn’t necessarily register as Christian to a casual listener.
As the next generation of rock enthusiasts discovers Skillet, they may realize over time that the band’s discography includes lots of songs with explicit references to Jesus and the Cross. They may not know what to make of them. Cooper said he welcomes those listeners regardless.
“I meet fans all the time who say something like, ‘I don’t get the Jesus stuff, but your music makes me feel better.’”
Kelsey Kramer McGinnis is the Worship Music Correspondent for Christianity Today.
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