As the self-professed geeky rockers release their conceptual 20th album, Rivers Cuomo and Patrick Wilson discuss dodging failure, being saved by fans and their obsessive creativity
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. “It’s like building sonic architecture, such a cool, stimulating experience,” he says, although he prefers to describe himself as a “composer”. “The term ‘songwriter’ feels like Paul Simon’s about to explain a sombre part of life,” adds his bandmate Patrick Wilson, 57, who plays drums and guitar and joins the interview from the garage of his California home. “What we do is more visceral: busting out a sick riff and saying to each other: ‘Dude, check this out!’”
Cuomo’s 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 “The Encyclopedia o’ Riffs”, keeps track of all his unused and unfinished ideas and is legendary among Weezer fans.) He also can’t resist a kooky conceptual hook to guide his songwriting – see the group’s 2021 heavy metal set, Van Weezer, or OK Human, their orchestral rock opus of the same year, or, obviously, SZNZ.
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 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.” 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. The line in CEO where Cuomo says he has “gotta keep this rocket in the sky” references the moment when the failure of Weezer’s second album, 1996’s Pinkerton, seemed to hobble their career before it began – a foundational trauma for the group’s leader.
He remains the pilot of his bandmates’ 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 “a real good sign” he might be on the right track with an idea, it’s clear he chiefly prized their solidarity as a group “to give us the strength to face any pushback from the audience”.
Raised in a Buddhist ashram in Connecticut, which taught him methods to “calm down my body and mind”, 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.
This disappointment – 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 – was “heartbreaking”, says Cuomo. But it proved the making of him. “If Zoom had ‘happened’, if my dreams had come true, I would just be the lead guitar player – the second lead guitar player, excuse me – 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.”
Weezer formed shortly after Nirvana’s fateful breakthrough. Cuomo had been seduced by the Pixies’ “big crunchy guitars, melody and heaviness” – one of numerous artists he discovered through his Tower co-workers. On Weezer’s earliest demos, he “tried singing like Black Francis or Kurt Cobain or Perry Farrell, more of a ‘rock’ voice. It took months before I finally gave up and sang with my natural, pure voice. I’d sung in school choirs; to my surprise, it still worked, even over the big guitars.”
It wasn’t just Cuomo’s 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’s 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 “just felt it was very uncool to try and be something you’re not”.
“The kids today would call it ‘being a sweat’,” says Wilson, un-coolly. “In hip-hop, they would have called it ‘fronting’.”
