Nick Aldis has been WWE’s SmackDown General Manager for a while now, but Saturday night at SummerSlam he traded the headset for tights. It was his first match in three years and his first ever inside a WWE ring, a one-on-one bout with Gunther. And when it came time to walk out, Aldis didn’t get a custom-built entrance theme. He got Oasis.
Aldis made his way to the ring to “Morning Glory,” the title track off the band’s 1995 album, a needle-drop WWE almost never allows. Licensed music is rare enough on WWE programming that CM Punk‘s use of Living Colour’s “Cult of Personality” is usually the exception people point to. Everyone else, from Cody Rhodes‘s “Kingdom” to Becky Lynch‘s “New Lows,” gets a custom-made theme built from scratch.
How Triple H Made It Happen
The story came out on the SummerSlam Night One post show, where Triple H explained that the idea started as a casual conversation a couple of weeks earlier.
“A couple of weeks ago, we were talking about music, and I was like, ‘Give me your fantasy. What’s the biggest fantasy?'” Triple H said. “He said, ‘What about Oasis?’ I said, ‘Maybe. Let’s see. Meanwhile, let’s work on something else.’ I was thrilled a few days ago to tell him that Oasis was in.”
Aldis had reportedly wanted the entrance for a while. Getting Oasis cleared for a one-off WWE moment isn’t a small ask, and the payoff showed on his face walking through the curtain.
Aldis didn’t win the match. Gunther got the better of him, and it makes sense given Aldis hadn’t wrestled since 2023. But he earned praise from Triple H afterward for the performance, and he’s already back to running SmackDown, since Triple H reinstated him as GM during the same post-show segment. The stakes clearly mattered to him going in too. In a pre-SummerSlam sitdown with Chris Van Vliet, Aldis had talked about this being his one shot and not wanting to let anybody down, which makes the Oasis walkout hit a little different in hindsight.
Bronson Reed Wants In Too
It didn’t take long for someone else on the roster to notice. Bronson Reed, currently out with a torn bicep, saw the Oasis entrance and immediately started making his own request.
“If Aldis can get Oasis, I better get Limp Bizkit when I return!!!!” Reed wrote, tagging Fred Durst directly. It wouldn’t be entirely unprecedented. The Undertaker briefly used Limp Bizkit’s “Rollin'” during his American Badass run, and the band has also soundtracked WWE pay-per-view video packages before. Whether Reed actually gets the needle-drop when he’s cleared to return is another question, but the ask alone is a fun follow-up to the moment Aldis just created.
For one night, a WWE authority figure who hadn’t laced up in years got to walk out to a song he’d apparently been picturing for a long time. That’s a good use of two weeks of backstage lobbying.
