The first song Rivers Cuomo wrote for Weezer\u2019s new album, their 20th, blatantly mimics the US rockers\u2019 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 \u201canother 90s jam\u201d and wishing he could do \u201csomething new \u2013 but nobody wants to hear that\u201d. It\u2019s a deliciously meta moment, but also one that allows Cuomo to gently vent \u201cmy frustrations over people wanting me to just write songs about our first two albums\u201d.<\/p>\n
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, \u201cfewer and fewer people were listening to them\u201d.<\/p>\n
His response was to \u201cthink strategically\u201d. On a video call from his home in Santa Monica, California, where Cuomo, 56, lives with his wife and children, he says he realised: \u201cIf 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.\u201d Accordingly, he took several years off from releasing any new material (\u201cto build up demand\u201d), ditched the high concepts of SZNZ and focused on creating what he thinks the fans want.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Gently venting their frustrations \u2026 CEO, from Weezer\u2019s 20th album.<\/p>\n
Like six previous albums, the new album is titled Weezer. It has already been dubbed the \u201cgold\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Cuomo is driven by his obsession with songwriting. \u201cIt\u2019s like building sonic architecture, such a cool, stimulating experience,\u201d he says, although he prefers to describe himself as a \u201ccomposer\u201d. \u201cThe term \u2018songwriter\u2019 feels like Paul Simon\u2019s about to explain a sombre part of life,\u201d adds his bandmate Patrick Wilson, 57, who plays drums and guitar and joins the interview from the garage of his California home. \u201cWhat we do is more visceral: busting out a sick riff and saying to each other: \u2018Dude, check this out!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Cuomo\u2019s approach is methodical to a degree that feels antithetical to rock music; he has boasted that Google Sheets is integral to his process. (One spreadsheet, which he has named \u201cThe Encyclopedia o\u2019 Riffs\u201d, keeps track of all his unused and unfinished ideas and is legendary among Weezer fans.) He also can\u2019t resist a kooky conceptual hook to guide his songwriting \u2013 see the group\u2019s 2021 heavy metal set, Van Weezer, or OK Human, their orchestral rock opus of the same year, or, obviously, SZNZ.<\/p>\n
The Gold Album is similarly conceptual, this time the concept being the creation of an album the Weezer faithful will love. Cuomo\u2019s process has been typically analytical and methodical \u2013 and it\u2019s clear he has loved the challenge. He views their live shows as the testing ground for the new material \u2013 \u201cwhere the rubber meets the road\u201d, he says. \u201cI want the people in the room to want to hear these new songs as well as our old hits, and to sing along. I wanted them to be really fun live, to have substantial riffs and guitar parts.\u201d Accordingly, he has taken inspiration from his favourite band of the moment, the Swedish heavy rockers Ghost, whom he says restored his understanding of \u201cthe power of stadium-rock riffage\u201d. Nevertheless, much of the Gold Album channels the loud guitars and pop-oriented tuneage of Weezer\u2019s eponymous 1994 debut, often brilliantly so.<\/p>\n
Almost over before they began \u2026 (from left) Cuomo, Wilson, Matt Sharp and Bell in 1996. Photograph: Martyn Goodacre\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
The new album is shaped by deeper wounds than those occasioned by SZNZ\u2019s reception, however. The line in CEO where Cuomo says he has \u201cgotta keep this rocket in the sky\u201d references the moment when the failure of Weezer\u2019s second album, 1996\u2019s Pinkerton, seemed to hobble their career before it began \u2013 a foundational trauma for the group\u2019s leader.<\/p>\n
He remains the pilot of his bandmates\u2019 fortunes as much as his own and, while the Gold Album sounds bold and confident, there are moments in our interview when his anxiety over this responsibility surfaces. They collaborated more as a group on the songwriting of the Gold Album than any previous Weezer release; while Cuomo talks about how their positive feedback was \u201ca real good sign\u201d he might be on the right track with an idea, it\u2019s clear he chiefly prized their solidarity as a group \u201cto give us the\u00a0strength to face any pushback from the audience\u201d.<\/p>\n
Raised in a Buddhist ashram in Connecticut, which taught him methods to \u201ccalm down my body and mind\u201d, Cuomo became a teenage metalhead and, in his late teens, under the influence of the Swedish poodle-rocker Yngwie Malmsteen, formed the hair-metal group Avant Garde. That group renamed itself Zoom and relocated to Los Angeles to make it big, but within a year they had imploded and Cuomo began working at Tower Records in West Hollywood.<\/p>\n
This disappointment \u2013 alluded to on The LA Sound, a song from the Gold Album, written by guitarist Brian Bell, about a no-hoper metal band running aground on the Sunset Strip circuit \u2013 was \u201cheartbreaking\u201d, says Cuomo. But it proved the making of him. \u201cIf Zoom had \u2018happened\u2019, if my dreams had come true, I would just be the lead guitar player \u2013 the second lead guitar player, excuse me \u2013 in a heavy metal band that would have been woefully out of style by 1992. Instead, my heart got broken and that led to something a lot bigger and better: singing, and expressing myself, and focusing on songs rather than shredding.\u201d<\/p>\n
Weezer formed shortly after Nirvana\u2019s fateful breakthrough. Cuomo had been seduced by the Pixies\u2019 \u201cbig crunchy guitars, melody and heaviness\u201d \u2013 one of numerous artists he discovered through his Tower co-workers. On Weezer\u2019s earliest demos, he \u201ctried singing like Black Francis or Kurt Cobain or Perry Farrell, more of a \u2018rock\u2019 voice. It took months before I finally gave up and sang with my natural, pure voice. I\u2019d sung in school choirs; to my surprise, it still worked, even over the big guitars.\u201d<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t just Cuomo\u2019s voice that set Weezer against the grain. They wore glasses and unhip clothes, while Cuomo sang about comic books and Dungeons & Dragons. The rock press identified them as nerds, a label they never quite shook loose and ended up embracing: they kicked off this year\u2019s Weezer: The Gathering tour, named after the fantasy card game Magic: The Gathering, with a pickleball tournament with their fans. Regarding this resistance to cool, Cuomo says they \u201cjust felt it was very uncool to try and be something you\u2019re not\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe kids today would call it \u2018being a sweat\u2019,\u201d says Wilson, un-coolly. \u201cIn hip-hop, they would have called it \u2018fronting\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still unapologetically nerdy \u2026 (from left) Bell, Cuomo, Wilson and Shriner. Photograph: Brendan Walter<\/p>\n
This honesty \u2013 along with Cuomo\u2019s infallible gift for pop songcraft \u2013 struck a chord in the post-Nirvana cash grab. But as their debut began its ascent to quintuple-platinum status, via a punishing schedule of touring and promotion, Cuomo\u2019s morale plummeted. In his diaries, he wrote of his dissatisfaction with this new rock\u2019n\u2019roll life. Addressing an imaginary rock-star-in-waiting, he gloomily advised: \u201cYou will get lonely \u2026 It\u2019s not all cocaine, chicks\u00a0and limos.\u201d<\/p>\n
His face is mostly obscured by shadow on our call, but Cuomo\u2019s disillusionment remains palpable three decades on. \u201cAll my life. I\u2019d figured that if I got a record deal \u2013 if\u00a0we got on MTV and radio \u2013 then I\u00a0would feel fulfilled and loved,\u201d he says. \u201cWe achieved all those things. But I still felt unseen and unheard and misunderstood and lonely.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cuomo abruptly ditched the tour bus for Harvard, where he studied classical composition alongside students sporting Weezer T-shirts, oblivious to his presence. The course deepened his feel for songwriting. \u201cCreatively, I was feeling incredibly confident. I was not happy about my personal life, but believed if I isolated myself \u2013 and, to an extent, tortured myself \u2013 I would be able to\u00a0create something really great.\u201d He pauses. \u201cI\u00a0was probably overconfident.\u201d<\/p>\n
Inspired by the antihero in Puccini\u2019s Madama Butterfly, he wrote Pinkerton, an ambitious, strikingly unguarded confession that success had left Cuomo engulfed by loneliness, disaffection and sexual confusion. Before the album\u2019s 1996 release, he warned the Weezer fanclub that it included \u201call the parts of myself that I was either afraid or embarrassed to think about before. So there\u2019s some pretty nasty stuff on there.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018A chaotic era\u2019 \u2026 (from left) Bell, Cuomo, Wilson and Sharp in 1996. Photograph: Martyn Goodacre\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
Sure enough, Across the Sea depicts him falling in love with a Japanese teenager who wrote him a fan letter (\u201cI wonder what clothes you wear to school \u2026 I wonder how you touch yourself\u201d); on Pink Triangle, he grumbles about a lesbian who doesn\u2019t fancy him; and, on The Good Life, he\u2019s \u201ca pig, I\u2019m a dog, so \u2019scuse me if I drool\u201d.<\/p>\n
The album was, he says, an act of catharsis. \u201cIt\u2019s always been hard for me to communicate feelings in words, in conversation,\u201d he sighs. \u201cBut if I can play them through melodies and chords and lyrics, I feel this tremendous emotional release.\u201d<\/p>\n