WEEZER - Weezer (Gold Album)

If I sang you a song (A song)
Would you still sing along? (Along)
(from “We Might As Well Be Strangers”)

And to think we'd doubted we could ever again hum along to a Weezer song, chasing Rivers Cuomo's familiar voice or yet another improbable, sticky-sweet chorus. Because the last decade of Weezer, let's say starting from the ill-fated “Pacific Daydream” in 2017, has been something like an erratic graph, with incredible lows (the “Black Album”, but also the covers record with the turquoise cover) and intriguing late twists (“OK Human”).
Cuomo's question, though, arrives in what could genuinely be a new beginning for the Los Angeles band, the start of a golden age, to stick with the tones of the cover art. It shows up, to be precise, in “We Might As Well Be Strangers”, the finest song Weezer have written since 1996, featured on the record alongside Wednesday, in what could be read as a kind of passing of the torch.

The first thing that strikes you about “Weezer (Gold Album)” is the sound, which right from the opening tracks — “Say Yes” and, especially, “Shine Again” — seems to have gone back, fittingly, to shining bright. The guitars glimmer and bite like they haven't in thirty years, Scott Shriner's bass skips along beneath the verses, and Patrick Wilson's drums push things forward with real love. Sure, between 2014 and 2016, with “EWBAITW” and “Weezer (White Album)”, the band had already gone through a decent creative rebirth, but the sound hadn't yet looked back to the legendary blue album. After all, the record closes with the fiery identity reclamation of “This Is The L.A. Sound”, where Rivers spells it out plainly: “We came to melt your face/ We're gonna torch this place/ We're gonna take you down/ This is the L.A. sound”.

Between charming nonsense rhymes you'll be humming from the first listen, like “C.E.O.”, a nostalgic ballad that catches fire in an electric finale (“Up In The Clouds”), and the odd stumble (“Hoops” and “The Shoe Must Go On”), the “Gold Album” goes down easy, like a cold drink on a scorching August day in Calabria. That Weezer might turn out some absolute dud in a couple of years is a given — but in the meantime we can enjoy a genuinely great record, pick out which of these songs deserve a spot in an ideal band best-of, and dream that a real golden age has finally begun.

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22/08/2026