The first song Rivers Cuomo wrote for Weezer’s new album, their 20th, blatantly mimics the US rockers’ 1994 debut single, Undone (The Sweater Song). On the track CEO, the singer-guitarist grumbles over a slow, Velvets-y backing about having to crank out “another 90s jam” and wishing he could do “something new – but nobody wants to hear that”. It’s a deliciously meta moment, but also one that allows Cuomo to gently vent “my frustrations over people wanting me to just write songs about our first two albums”.
Cuomo wrote the song straight after SZNZ, the four-album song-cycle Weezer released throughout 2022, each album named after a season. That project fed his notoriously intense, analytic and occasionally obsessive approach to songwriting. Thanks to the kind of data artists have at their fingertips in the streaming age, though, he realised that, with each subsequent SZNZ, “fewer and fewer people were listening to them”.
His response was to “think strategically”. On a video call from his home in Santa Monica, California, where Cuomo, 56, lives with his wife and children, he says he realised: “If I want people to listen to my music, I need to think less like a mad scientist in the research and development department and more like a CEO.” Accordingly, he took several years off from releasing any new material (“to build up demand”), ditched the high concepts of SZNZ and focused on creating what he thinks the fans want. Like six previous albums, the new album is titled Weezer.
It has already been dubbed the “gold” album by fans, due to its sleeve colour. While the arch lyrics to CEO might suggest it is a cynical exercise in pandering to his audience, the Gold Album is a more complex, sophisticated beast. Cuomo is driven by his obsession with songwriting.
The Gold Album is similarly conceptual, this time the concept being the creation of an album the Weezer faithful will love. Cuomo’s process has been typically analytical and methodical – and it’s clear he has loved the challenge. He views their live shows as the testing ground for the new material – “where the rubber meets the road”, he says.
I wanted them to be really fun live, to have substantial riffs and guitar parts.” Accordingly, he has taken inspiration from his favourite band of the moment, the Swedish heavy rockers Ghost, whom he says restored his understanding of “the power of stadium-rock riffage”. Nevertheless, much of the Gold Album channels the loud guitars and pop-oriented tuneage of Weezer’s eponymous 1994 debut, often brilliantly so. The new album is shaped by deeper wounds than those occasioned by SZNZ’s reception, however.
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