Brian Hiatt
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Co-producer Kenny Blume wanted to make "the most violent Weezer album ever" Brendan Walter* Midway through Weezer’s The Gold Album, due Aug. 21st, Rivers Cuomo offers an apparent glimpse into his onstage thoughts. “Cranking out another Nineties jam,” he intones in a spoken-word verse on the track “C.E.O.” “Wish I could do something new/ But nobody wants to hear that/ They just want the classics/ You can’t blame ’em, really/ There’s something special about your early shit.” The guitar parts beneath him bear some resemblance to “Undone (The Sweater Song),” which might seem like part of the joke, except there’s no joke at all.
As Cuomo explains, “This question’s come up in the past — how tongue-in-cheek are you in ‘Beverly Hills,’ for example, or when you say, ‘What’s with these homies dissing my girl?’ I don’t think I’m being tongue-in-cheek at all. If you were to read my mind at that time, those were the exact thoughts that would be going through it.”
“Here comes the C.E.O.,” the song’s chorus goes, but it originally was “I’m the C.E.O.” In both versions, Cuomo is singing about his discomfort with becoming, in essence, the head of the commercial enterprise that is Weezer, Inc. “I was bemoaning the fact that I’m finding myself in this role that doesn’t really work with being an artist,” Cuomo says. “Everyone loved the song, but nobody liked that line. We ended up externalizing it — it’s like I’ve externalized this part of myself that’s bringing down the party.” Along the way, drummer Patrick Wilson pitched “I’m C-3PO” instead, which was tempting: “I really liked that one,” Cuomo adds.
(To hear an audio interview with Cuomo and Wilson, check out Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above.)
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As a whole, The Gold Album, co-produced by Geese collaborator Kenny Blume (f.k.a. Kenny Beats) and Klas Åhlund, is actually about Cuomo relinquishing his usual level of control, on multiple levels, and ending up with one of the best Weezer albums of this century. The album is full of songwriting contributions from the other members — in a first for the band, Wilson wrote the first single, “Shine Again” — along with an unusual number of intra-band co-writes. “ I guess we’re in a new spirit of sort of openness and collaboration,” Wilson says.
Cuomo started thinking about reshaping his approach last year, while the band was shooting a forthcoming, still-top-secret movie. “It was basically like this comedy improv project,” he says, “and I have never had so much fun as I did working with these guys during that time. We were improv acting and joking around, but it was so funny and so fun. And at the end of that process, I was like, ‘Wow, if only record-making could be that much fun, and feel so collaborative, and like we’re playing off of each other’s energy, and making stuff up together in the moment.’ And so I wanted to head into the making of this record with the goal of having that much fun with these guys.”
Specifically, Cuomo deferred to Wilson, the other remaining founding member (guitarist Brian Bell joined towards the end of making their debut album, while bassist Scott Shriner came aboard in 2001). “I had this super-strong instinct that I wanted Pat to take a turn at the wheel, as far as the overall aesthetic of the album,” Cuomo says. “I come from a more grid-like background — I grew up on Metallica records where everything is super precise and machine-like. But I just had this feeling like, man, if we make the kind of record Patrick would actually listen to, that could be a real sweet spot for Weezer.” It was Wilson’s idea to spend weeks in a rehearsal room (actually a living room, in Panic! At The Disco drummer Dan Pawlovich’s house), piecing the songs together, rather than work from Cuomo’s demos. “Let’s just get in a room together and play and see what happens,” Cuomo says. “And less talk, more rock.”
Brian Bell, who co-wrote the standout track “The L.A. Sound,” which chronicles the band’s early touring days, chimes in with a larger point: “ Everything we’ve ever done has been a group effort,” he says. “Whether we’re getting credited on the record is another thing. But Weezer sounds the way it does because of the members of Weezer… We’ve been collaborative — that’s happened through our history, It’s just now we’ve meshed into this entity that’s celebrating that collaboration… What’s so great about this album is that it’s not perfect. It’s not lined up with Pro Tools. It’s organic.”
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Wilson successfully pushed to record his drum parts without a click track, a nearly unheard-of approach in 2026. “So much music now is just programmed and so compressed, and I instantly don’t care when I hear it,” he says. “You get a certain kind of tightness when you’re not playing along to a click track. Not to compare myself to [drummer] Clyde Stubblefield, who’s an obvious genius, but James Brown recordings are tight in a way that quantized music is not tight. It breathes and moves, but it’s just so together.” He likes to think The Gold Album sits, sonically, right between the band’s first two albums: “What’s great about the Blue Album is there’s no fat on any of it. Pinkerton is so bombastic and just explosive, and the Blue Album is just so focused. I really feel like this is the best happy medium of both of those.” Shriner says all the changes were welcome, especially in contrast to recent albums where the process felt more impersonal. “There’s been a few records before this one where I didn’t see anybody in the band,” Shriner says. “The producer’s gonna travel to Orange County somewhere to record Pat. Rivers has already done his scratch vocal and guitar. Brian [Bell] has his time slotted, and I can show up at one o’clock and do bass from one to four — even to the point where I’d walk in and would never have heard the music. This was so incredibly different.” The no-click approach, he adds, means “there’s actually some life in the music that I haven’t felt in such a long time… I think Pat has kinda always wanted to do that, and maybe just from my outside-inside observation, Rivers really made the shift to come to a middle place and start listening. When those two are getting along and working together, the band just flourishes.”
Cuomo first reached out to Swedish producer Åhlund after admiring his work with Ghost. Åhlund had just finished a Show Me the Body record with Blume, so he suggested they again produce as a team, combining his attention to songcraft with what Cuomo describes as Blume’s “brutal, raw energy.” “Kenny brought this kind of educated-thug vibe,” Shriner says. “He’s six-foot-seven, big solid dude, very physically intimidating — and I just appreciate that. This guy’s a real force, he’s got the knowledge to back it up, and he’s a massive Weezer fan. In his words, he wanted to make the most violent Weezer record ever.”
Blume pushed the guitar sounds toward desert-rock sludge, relying on a secret weapon: a tiny Gibson amplifier from the 1940s. “It looks like something you’d buy in a Sears catalog back in the mid-20th century,” says Cuomo, who packed the album with even more tasty solos and fills than usual. “But if you turn it up all the way, it sounds brutal. It’s actually quite a bit like what our guitars sounded like before we made the Blue Album, before we started working with Ric Ocasek. It felt like coming home.”
Cuomo acknowledges that the current, belated viral success of “Go Away,” his 2014 duet with Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino, inspired him to turn what became the album’s second single, “We Might As Well Be Strangers,” into a collaboration with Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman. Blume started playing Wednesday’s music for Cuomo his first day at the studio, so Hartzman was a natural choice. Shriner was so fond of the song’s pre-duet version that he initially resisted the guest vocal — “somebody outside of the family comes in and starts singing, and it’s like, I wanna stay in the Rivers zone” — but came around: “It took on a different life form. I think it’s gorgeous now.”
The album’s opening track, “Say Yes,” with its memorable declaration, “I only get one weird life I get to live,” was another song that transformed along the way. “Originally it was called ‘School Sucks,’ and I was writing to my middle-school son,” Cuomo says. “Telling him, ‘I get it — homework sucks, teachers suck, all this really sucks. Don’t worry about it.’ But nobody wanted to hear me sing ‘school sucks.'” The song is still, at heart, addressed to his son: “We put so much pressure on kids and try to scare them into doing this dull stuff.”
The band kicks off its Weezer: The Gathering tour in September, the same month as the 30th anniversary of Pinkerton, but they aren’t thinking much about celebrating it, on stage or off. “I haven’t heard any special plans,” Cuomo says, though he emphasizes he remains a fan of the album, after expressing shifting opinions on it over the years. “ I don’t remember what you heard last, but I do think it’s good.” For his part, Bell is more into the idea of celebrating 2001’s Green Album when its 30th anniversary rolls around.
The band is already meeting about production and set design for the tour, which they expect will include four or five tracks from The Gold Album each night. “Can you imagine the four of us all working together and feeling good and excited about going on tour?” asks Shriner. “You think every band feels that way? For everybody to be kinda stoked at the same time is a pretty big deal. This may be the most authentic, positive joining of the four of us in my history with the group.”
Wilson agrees: “What other band from our origin era is hitting creative strides like we are? It feels like chi has been unblocked.”
