ALBUM REVIEW - WEEZER – THE GOLD ALBUM
- Rick E
- 14 hours ago
- 9 min read
WORDS RICK E
WEEZER
THE GOLD ALBUM
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Weezer have never been a band short on colour. Across three decades and an ever-expanding palette of self-titled records: Blue, Green, Red, White, Teal, Black. Rivers Cuomo and company have turned the very act of naming an album into a running commentary on where their heads are at. With The Gold Album, their twentieth studio album and the seventh entry in that famous chromatic sequence, the colour choice feels pointed.
This is a band declaring, with no small amount of cheek, that it has reached something precious. Each self-titled record has arrived as a kind of reset, Blue the wide-eyed debut, Green the comeback, White the late-career vindication and each has carried an implicit argument about the band's state of mind. Gold, then, is not a modest name, and it is a measure of the album's confidence that it very nearly justifies the swagger. Tellingly, it is also the first of their colour records to forgo a photograph of the band on the sleeve.
What makes Gold land so differently from the recent run of Weezer records is not a reinvention but a reunion. After the sprawling, seasonal experiment of 2022's SZNZ and a long stretch in which Cuomo's home-studio instincts increasingly steered the ship, all four members reconvened in a rehearsal room to write and record as genuine equals. The catalyst, improbably, was a film: the band's collaborative work on a forthcoming feature reminded them what it felt like to build something together, shoulder to shoulder, rather than trading files across a hard drive.
Signing to Reprise for their first release on the label, Weezer pitched Gold, only half-jokingly, as the most violent album of their career. It is not violent in any literal sense, but the ambition behind the phrase is audible: fatter guitars, a rhythm section captured live and loud, and a deliberate stripping-away of the gloss that has coated so much of their twenty-first-century output. This is Weezer with the studio sheen sanded off, chasing the ragged immediacy of a band that still, thirty years on, has something to prove.
The timing is not accidental. Gold lands in the wake of the Blue Album's thirtieth anniversary and the extended victory-lap touring that came with it — a period that clearly reminded Weezer of the raw, guitar-first appeal of their earliest work. It is their first proper full-length since 2021's Van Weezer and their first release of any kind since the four seasonal SZNZ mini albums that closed out 2022, a gap long enough in an era of relentless content to count as a genuine pause for breath. The early notices have been among the warmest of the band's late career, and it is easy to hear why: for once, the narrative surrounding a Weezer record and the record itself are pulling in precisely the same direction.
Say Yes opens proceedings and immediately establishes the record's dual citizenship. A clearly Cuomo-driven composition, it swings from a bouncing, playfully overstuffed verse into a chorus built for immediate, arms-aloft agreement. Everything that makes Weezer Weezer is present in miniature: the stacked harmonies, the sugar-rush hook, the guitars that flirt with heaviness without ever quite tipping into it. It is a canny choice of opener, a handshake rather than a bodycheck, and it whets the appetite for the sharper turns to come. As one of the more unmistakably Cuomo-led moments here, it also works as a quiet reassurance to the faithful, before the album's wider democracy kicks in, here is the frontman reminding everyone that the classic Weezer formula is still very much intact and still, maddeningly, effortless.
Shine Again is where the album's thesis snaps into focus. Written by Wilson and chosen as the lead single, it is a rocker in the fullest sense, built on fuzzed-up, low-slung riffing and a chorus that swings for the rafters without a trace of irony.
There is a stoner-rock heft here that Weezer have flirted with before but rarely committed to so wholeheartedly, and there is real craft in the way the lyric sets everyday drudgery against a sudden, unguarded reach for something bigger. It is the sound of a band remembering that loud can also be joyful, and it functions as both a statement of intent and a genuine earworm, the first moment on the record where the return-to-basics promise pays off in full. That it came from Wilson rather than Cuomo tells you almost everything about how this album was made and about why it crackles with an energy the band has too often mislaid.
Don't Make It Weird pushes the pop instinct further still. Lighter and springier even than the opener, it pairs rapid-fire, half-spoken verses with a chorus sweet enough to induce a sugar high, pitched somewhere in the giddy, riff-happy zone the band mined on Van Weezer. It is the album at its most unabashedly fun, and while purists may bristle at the sweetness, there is real craft in how tightly the thing is wound. Weezer have always understood that a great pop song is a serious act of engineering dressed up as a lark, and this is a small masterclass in exactly that. It also quietly complicates the album's "most violent" billing, anyone arriving braced for three straight minutes of stoner-rock menace will instead be met with one of the sunniest, most sitcom-bright things the band has committed to tape in years and will very likely be won over regardless.
We Might as Well Be Strangers is the record's most affecting moment and, not coincidentally, one of its clear highlights. A duet between Cuomo and Karly Hartzman of indie favourites Wednesday, co-written with Luther Russell, it trades bombast for a bruised, conversational intimacy. Hartzman's presence pulls Cuomo somewhere he does not often go into a true back-and-forth rather than his usual monologue and the contrast between their voices gives the song its ache. It is proof that the album's back-to-basics ethos leaves ample room for nuance, and that Weezer's melodic gifts translate just as powerfully to melancholy as they do to euphoria. Released ahead of the album as its second single, it was the moment that told everyone something special might be coming, the sound of a band willing to reach outside its own bubble and, in doing so, to find fresh emotional territory in a career that had seemed, not so long ago, to be running low on surprises. It is the kind of collaboration that could read as a marketing calculation on paper and yet, in practice, feels like nothing of the sort.
C.E.O. may be the album's boldest swing. Teased years ago, as a "meta and mind-bending" sequel to Undone, The Sweater Song, it makes good on that impossible-sounding promise, weaving unmistakable threads of the 1994 classic through a track that is at once an homage to and a gentle mockery of Weezer's own foundational sound. The lyrics are wry and knowing without ever tipping into mere novelty, self-aware without collapsing into self-parody. That it works at all is remarkable; that it stands as one of the record's genuine highlights complete with a cameo-stuffed video is a testament to how comfortable this band has become poking fun at its own mythology. Thirty years on, they can revisit their most famous song and come away with something that feels new rather than nostalgic. It is the sort of trick that could so easily have curdled into fan-service or, worse, into a hollow rewrite; instead, it lands as one of the most purely enjoyable things here, a wink to the diehards that somehow still works as a song in its own right for anyone who has never heard the original.
Hoops is the album's comic relief, and gloriously so. Built on some of the nastiest, most gnarled guitar riffs on the entire record, it channels that muscle into a wry, throwaway lark, with Cuomo playing the exasperated technophobe worn down by a world in which the simplest daily tasks now arrive freighted with needless complication. It should not work as well as it does, but the sheer contrast between the heaviness of the playing and the lightness of the conceit is the joke, and Weezer land it with a grin. It is a reminder that few bands wear their nerdiness with such unapologetic charm or turn everyday exasperation into something this hummable. On another Weezer album it might have felt like filler; here, buoyed by the sheer heft of the production, it earns its place as a genuine highlight rather than a novelty.
Nowhere is one of the record's most fascinating curios. Reportedly begun with Wilson's side project The Special Goodness in mind, it bears his fingerprints all over the riffs, the melodies, the lyrical eye, and it drags the album into its heaviest, most glam-inflected corner.
Rhythmically off-kilter and unusually weighty, it turns a jaundiced eye on modern life with a weariness that feels earned rather than performative. It is, tellingly, the track that sounds least like conventional Weezer, and that strangeness is exactly what makes it compelling. Wilson's stamp on this album runs deeper than on any Weezer record in memory, and this is the clearest evidence of it. Whether you read that as a bug or a feature will likely depend on how precious you are about the Weezer blueprint — but there is no denying the track's conviction, nor the sense that a genuinely different creative engine is being allowed to drive for once.
The Show Must Go On carries a small piece of history in its credits: it is the first Weezer song to feature writing from Karl Koch, the band's long-serving historian, and confidant, alongside producer Klas Åhlund. Fittingly, there is something valedictory in its DNA: the sense of a band that has weathered every conceivable cycle of hype and backlash and simply kept going. It is a sturdy, propulsive thing, and knowing the hands that shaped it lends it an extra warmth. Few groups could turn an in-joke about their own longevity into something this genuinely rousing, and fewer still would think to hand the pen to the man who has quietly documented every twist of their story for the better part of three decades. It is a small, deeply Weezer gesture, and a touching one.
Up in the Clouds is the album's most unlikely survivor, a song whose origins stretch all the way back to the sessions for 2014's Everything Will Be Alright in the End. Resurrected and reworked with Bell and Russell, it wears its long gestation lightly, arriving as a shimmering, expansive piece that offers welcome altitude late in the running order. That a decade-old demo could slot so naturally into these sessions speaks volumes about the coherence of the album's vision, this is a band finally in tune enough with itself to recognise a good idea whenever it surfaces, no matter how long it has been waiting in the vault. There is a lovely irony in the fact that one of the album's most weightless, forward-looking moments is also its oldest, a reminder that Weezer's best melodies have a way of remaining stubbornly timeless, however long they sit gathering dust.
The LA Sound closes the album by looking backward, chronicling the band's scrappy early touring days with a fondness that never curdles into mere nostalgia. Co-written once more with Russell, it works as both a full stop and a mission statement, tracing a line from the sweaty clubs of the band's youth to the arenas they now fill. It is a graceful, reflective closer, the sound of a group taking stock of thirty years and finding, perhaps to its own surprise, that the fire still burns. It leaves the listener not with a sense of finality but with the urge to press play all over again.
What is most striking about Gold is how comfortable Weezer sound in their own skin. There is no anxious chasing of trends here, no over-corrective lurch toward whatever the algorithm currently rewards. Instead, there is the unmistakable ease of a band that has finally stopped arguing with its own legacy. Thirty years on from the Blue Album, having lived through every possible verdict — beloved, reviled, rediscovered, dismissed, and beloved again. Weezer have arrived at a record that sounds like a group genuinely enjoying one another's company.
Strip away the back-story, the film-set genesis, and the return-to-basics narrative, and what remains is simply one of the strongest and most consistent collections of Weezer songs in well over a decade. From the arms-aloft immediacy of Say Yes to the reflective grace of The LA Sound, there is barely a wasted moment across these ten tracks. The much-touted violence turns out to be something of a red herring; the real story is warmth, craft, and a rediscovered sense of purpose. In a discography as vast and as wildly uneven as Weezer's, an album this consistent is its own kind of minor miracle.
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It is worth pausing, too, on what this record means within the larger arc of the colour albums. That self-titled tradition has always functioned as Weezer's way of marking a fresh start, and the best of those records Blue, White, capture the band at moments of unusual clarity about who they are. Gold belongs in that conversation. It is not the reckless masterpiece of a band with everything to prove, because Weezer are three decades past that particular hunger; it is instead the assured, generous work of a group that has made its peace with its own history and found, in collaboration, a way to keep that history moving forward. After twenty albums, which is no small achievement, and it is one that far too many of their contemporaries never managed at all.
Call it a return to form, call it a golden era, call it whatever you like. Weezer, gloriously, are back in the room and they sound like they never want to leave.
Thirty years deep, the misfits from LA have struck gold — and they have earned every carat.
4/5
WEEZER — THE GOLD ALBUM
1. Say Yes
2. Shine Again
3. Don't Make It Weird
4. We Might as Well Be Strangers (feat. Wednesday)
5. C.E.O.
6. Hoops
7. Nowhere
8. The Show Must Go On
9. Up in the Clouds
10. The LA Sound
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