Halfway through Gold Albums by Weezer Rivers Cuomo seems to sing certain thoughts that go through his head when he's on stage. “Let's crank out another '90s jam,” goes a spoken verse from CEO“I wish I could do something new / but nobody wants to hear it / They only want the classics / and basically you can't blame them / there's something special about the stuff you did in the early days.” The guitar parts are somewhat reminiscent Undone (The Sweater Song)which could be an integral part of the joke. Except there's no joke. Cuomo explains it: «They have already asked me the same question in the past: are you being ironic Beverly Hills when you sing “What's with these homies dissing my girl?”. I'm not at all. Those are the thoughts that go through my head.”
The chorus of the song says “Here comes the CEO”, but at the beginning it was “I'm the CEO”. In both versions, Cuomo sings about the discomfort he feels in finding himself, in fact, the head of the company Weezer Inc. “I found myself in a role that doesn't fit with being an artist,” he says. «Everyone liked the song, but that phrase didn't convince anyone. So we ended up projecting it externally: it's as if I had outsourced the party pooper role.” At one point, drummer Patrick Wilson proposed “I'm C-3PO,” an idea that was very tempting to him.
As a whole Weezer (Gold Album)which will be released on August 21st and is co-produced by Kenny Blume (formerly of Kenny Beats) and Klas Åhlund, is about Cuomo's decision to give up trying to control things and in exchange get one of the group's best records of this century. The other musicians contributed to the writing – for the first time in the band's history, Wilson wrote the first single, i.e Shine Again – and there is an unusually high number of pieces composed by multiple hands. “It's a new phase of openness and collaboration,” Wilson says.
Cuomo started thinking about changing his approach last year, when the band was filming a soon-to-be-released movie that's still top secret. «It was basically a comedy improvisation project, I had never had so much fun working with these guys. We improvised, we joked, it was all incredibly fun. At the end of that experience I said to myself: if only making a record was as fun, such a collaborative experience, with everyone feeding off each other's energy and inventing things on the spot… So I decided to approach this album with the aim of having the same amount of fun.”
Cuomo decided to make room for Wilson, the only other founding member in the band (Brian Bell joined towards the end of the debut sessions, bassist Scott Shriner arrived in 2001). «My instinct told me very strongly to leave the helm to Pat, at least as far as the overall aesthetic of the record was concerned. I grew up listening to Metallica records where everything is super precise, almost mechanical and I had the feeling that if we made the kind of album that someone like Patrick would listen to, it would be perfect for Weezer.”
Instead of starting from Cuomo's demos, Wilson proposed spending a few weeks in a rehearsal room, which would then be the living room of Dan Pawlovich, drummer of Panic! At The Disco, putting together the songs together. “Let's play it and see what happens,” Cuomo says. «Less talk and more rock».
According to Brian Bell, who is among the authors of The LA Soundthe piece that recounts the band's first years of touring, «we have always done a group job, whether we are then credited on the record is another matter. But Weezer sounds the way it does thanks to its members, only now we celebrate it openly… The nice thing about this album is that it's not perfect, it's not gridded to the millisecond like you do with Pro Tools. It sounds more natural.”
Wilson managed to impose his idea of recording drum parts without clicks, a rare approach in 2026. «Today a lot of music is programmed, super compressed and uninteresting. When you don't play with the click you get a different kind of precision. I don't want to compare myself to Clyde Stubblefield, who is an absolute genius, but James Brown's recordings are precise in a way that gridded music isn't. They breathe, they move, yet everything is perfectly cohesive.” He likes to think that the Gold Albumssonically, sits exactly halfway between the band's first two albums. «The fantastic thing about Blue Album is that there is not a gram of superfluous fat. Pinkerton it is emphatic, explosive, where the Blue Album he is incredibly focused. I have the feeling that this album represents the best possible meeting point between those two.”
Shriner says that all these changes were more than welcome, especially compared to more recent records, in which the creative process had become impersonal. «While they made some records before this one I hardly saw any other members of the band. The producer was going somewhere in Orange County to record Pat. Rivers had already recorded lead vocals and guitar. Brian had his shift booked, and I could show up at 1, record bass until 4, and leave, to the point where I would walk into the studio without ever having even heard the songs. This time everything was different.” The absence of the click means that «there is a vitality in the music that I haven't felt for a long time… I think Pat has always wanted to work like this and Rivers looked for a meeting point with the others, he started listening to them. When the two of them get along and work together, the band flourishes again.”
Cuomo contacted Åhlund because of his work with Ghost. Åhlund approached Kenny Blume by pairing his signature focus on writing with what Cuomo calls Blume's “brutal, raw energy.” “Kenny is kind of a cultured punk,” Shriner says. «He is more than two meters tall, a massive man, physically scary, and I like this. He's someone who exudes incredible strength, has the expertise to back it up, and is a die-hard Weezer fan. As he put it, he wanted to make the most violent record in Weezer history.”
Blume pushed the sound of the guitars towards desert rock, relying on a secret weapon: a tiny Gibson amplifier from the 1940s, “one of those things you could buy from a Sears catalog in the mid-twentieth century”, says Cuomo, who included even more solos and licks than usual on the record. «If you bring it to maximum volume it becomes devastating. It's a lot like the sound of our guitars before we recorded the Blue Albumbefore starting to work with Ric Ocasek. It was like coming home.”
Cuomo admits that the slow-burn success of Go Awaythe 2014 duet with Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino, inspired him to turn what would become the album's second single, We Might As Well Be Strangersin a collaboration with Wednesday's Karly Hartzman, whom he met through Blume. Shriner was so fond of the original version of the song that he opposed the idea of the duet. “Someone who isn't part of the family comes along, starts singing and you end up thinking that you'd rather stay inside Rivers' world.” He then changed his mind: «The song has taken on a completely different form, now I find it splendid».
Even the piece that opens the album, Say Yes (“I only have one strange life to live”) he changed his face by working on it. «At first it was called School SucksI wrote it thinking about my son who is in middle school,” says Cuomo. “I told him, 'I know, homework sucks, teachers suck, all this stuff sucks. Don't worry about it.' But apparently no one wanted to hear me sing “school sucks”». Even though it has changed, the song continues to be dedicated to her son. “We put enormous pressure on kids and try to scare them into doing boring things.”
The group's tour will start in September, in time for the thirtieth anniversary of Pinkertonbut no one seems interested in celebrating the anniversary, neither on stage nor off. Cuomo loves that record, despite having said otherwise over the years. Bell, for his part, would be more interested in celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of Green Album of 2001, when the time comes. In the meantime, the band has already started discussing the production and scenography of the tour, during which it plans to play four or five songs taken from the Gold Albums.
“Can you imagine all four of us working together, feeling good, and excited to go on tour?” Shriner asks. «Do you think this happens in all bands? It's important that everyone is so charged up at the same time. Since I joined the group we have never been so excited and with such a positive mentality.” Wilson agrees: «What other band of our generation is having a creative moment like ours? It's as if the Who had been unlocked.” Cuomo puts it in even simpler terms: “I like spending time with these kids and being silly with them. As a young person you take it for granted. Now I really appreciate it.”
Bell came into the interview with some previously written reflections on the spirit of the album's title. “Gold doesn't necessarily represent what you might naturally think, that is, having a hit, money or something gold-plated,” he reads from his notes. «It's more similar to the meaning of the expression stay gold of the Ponyboy character in The Outsiderswhich essentially means maintaining a sense of wonder. This album is really about rediscovering, as a band, that sense of wonder.”
From Rolling Stone US.
