With its twentieth album, Rivers Cuomo’s band has finally decided to return to what it does best, and what it does like no one else. Here are the explanations.
“There’s something special about your early shit”, murmurs Rivers Cuomo at the turn of C.E.O., a track about “giving people what they want” while evoking the 90s textures of Undone – The Sweater Song, one of the Blue Album’s 1994 hits. And perhaps this is the first time that one of Weezer’s many color-titled albums truly deserves to be called Weezer. This Gold Album (a.k.a. Weezer again) indeed does more than just reconnect the band’s early spark and the prickliness of the underrated Maladroit (2002). From Say Yes opening, where Beatles-esque inspiration collides with FM guitar textures, vocal acrobatics and pedal-to-the-metal tempo shifts, the track signals the approach. The aptly named Shine Again then confirms that the band is here to deliver its most dazzlingly effective punch.
Barely exaggerating, there’s already more of the Weezer we love in these first two tracks than in almost the entirety of the group’s 21st-century output. The hook of the chorus lands with extra punch on the already-classic We Might As Well Be Strangers, which rhymes “Nietzsche” with “need ya” and, perhaps most notably, invites Wednesday for a blessing that works in two directions. All these signs pull us away from the usual inconsistency of Weezer since Make Believe (2005), despite a few scattered highlights. Here, it’s the opposite: the set exudes a high-grade punk-rock energy (in the noble sense) that even the few platitudes (like the rather weak chorus of Hoops, saved by its calypso middle eight) read as politeness.
The Art of Rollercoasters in Three Minutes
Short and lean—well, lean but with some heft—Weezer (Gold Album) focuses on its rollercoaster craft (rage climbs and melancholic descents) in three minutes. More than the awkward four “seasons” with lukewarm pizza vibes (the four SZNZ EPs) in 2022, and even more than the double streak of pleasant surprises OK Human and Van Weezer in 2021, this Gold Album reconnects with Cuomo’s disarming way of crafting electric pop. What helps is also the production (signed by Klas Ahlund and Kenneth Blume, a Vince Staples collaborator and the producer of Geese’s Getting Killed in 2025): have the band ever sounded so tight?
Composed by lead singer Rivers Cuomo along with his bandmates, the songs benefit from a no-frills presentation but with just enough rough edges to foil the cheerful demagoguery of the solos — a big risk of compulsive air-guitar to expect. If the group’s secret project has always been to reconcile Nirvana’s sloppiness with the baubles of Guns N’ Roses (in other words, another version of the “Milky Way rock” defined by the Pixies), then it has surely never been more accomplished than on these ten tracks. We won’t go so far as to declare it “the best Weezer album,” but if that claim ever appears somewhere, we’ll concede it has some merit. And we’ll conclude this chronicle by noting that Pinkerton (1996) isn’t mentioned at all. Ah, well.
Weezer (Gold Album) (Warner Records). Release date: August 21.
