Weezer

Essential Albums

  • Weezer (Green Album)
    Weezer (Green Album)
    Weezer (Green Album)

    Echoing their 1994 debut right down to producer Ric Ocasek and the primary color scheme of its cover (whose hue got it dubbed “Green Album”), Weezer is an exercise in shrewd, if brisk pop economy whose best tracks confirm songwriter Rivers Cuomo’s quirky gifts. “Knockdown Dragout” and “Glorious Days” positively bristle, while the snarky anthem “Hash Pipe” could only be the product of Cuomo’s skewed brilliance.

  • Pinkerton
    Pinkerton
    Pinkerton

    1996

  • Weezer
    Weezer
    Weezer

    Let’s say it’s 1994. Kurt Cobain is dead. Grunge is over, if it was ever real to begin with, but “alternative” music is part of the mainstream in ways it never was before. Artists like Beck, Green Day, The Breeders, Nine Inch Nails and Pavement might not have had much in common in terms of musical genealogy or ambition, but they held similar symbolic places in their fans’ minds—this was music that made you feel like you were part of something smaller, different, more personal, less perfect. This band could be your life. Then there was Weezer. On the one hand, they were the final boss of relatability—outcasts buried in comic books (“In the Garage”), last picked for dodgeball, forgotten by their parents (“Say It Ain’t So”) and shunned by their peers (“The World Has Turned and Left Me Here”). On the other, their music could be as polished and ruthlessly controlled as anything we call “pop”, every hook and chorus and sweetly harmonious chord change engineered for maximum pleasure—no accidents, no jazz. That they were just another Los Angeles band trying to get a record deal, as opposed to more home-grown, scene-oriented artists like Nirvana or Green Day, made a kind of sense, too. Being “alternative” was just the first step to being mainstream. Listening to the demos and practice sessions from various reissues, including the 2024 30th-anniversary deluxe edition of the album, only reinforces the point. Even the seemingly off-the-cuff guitar break in “Buddy Holly” was planned pretty much to the note months before they went into the studio. As polite as they looked, there was something eerie about them, too. “No One Else” (as in “I want a girl who will laugh for…”), “Holiday”, “Buddy Holly”’s fantasy of a more innocent—but also more rigid, retrograde—world. Like The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Weezer captured male adolescent yearning so intense it became abstract, detached from the messy complexities that made human relationships so unpredictable. If they couldn’t have the girl of their dreams, they’d build her in a lab. Rivers Cuomo was a Kiss fan, and you could tell by listening, if not by looking: Weezer was, at every turn, hero music, the sound of winners made for people who grew up feeling like losers. That they became one of the most famous and cultishly beloved rock bands of their generation made sense, especially when paired with the rise of the internet: Suddenly, you could embrace your individualistic geekdom and build community at the same time. Huge, romantic and totally uncynical, Weezer was the soundtrack to once-distinct subcultures melting down and remoulding into something shinier and smoother.

Artist Playlists

Compilations

About Weezer

Decades after their founding, Weezer remain something of an enigma, a blend of big, joyful arena rock with leader Rivers Cuomo’s shy-guy reticence, metal riffs with nerdy lyrics and goofy humour with obsessively precise pop craft. Formed in California in 1992, the band debuted with 1994’s Weezer (a.k.a. “The Blue Album”), an album whose indelible hooks (“Say It Ain't So”, “Undone - The Sweater Song”) and overall sweet disposition (“Buddy Holly”) made it an instant antidote to the angst of grunge. Weezer returned in 1996 with Pinkerton—a moody, noisy and self-loathing record that came to be embraced as a cult classic—and then took a nearly five-year break, with bassist Matt Sharp leaving to form The Rentals. The 2001 comeback Weezer (a.k.a. “The Green Album”) ignited a period of increased productivity, with the group regularly turning out albums of charming, polished and slightly eccentric power pop. A commercial high-water mark was 2005’s Make Believe, whose stomp-along anthem “Beverly Hills” became a U.S. Top 10 hit. Unexpectedly, Weezer would ascend back into the Hot 100 in 2018 when, after a fan-led social-media campaign, the band released a cover of Toto’s 1982 smash “Africa”—an expression of both their commitment to and utterly carefree attitude toward their place in the culture. The success of the song sparked a covers album, Weezer (a.k.a. “The Teal Album”), which was followed a month later by Weezer (a.k.a. “The Black Album”). Subsequent releases have found the band members forging new ground while tipping their hat to their idols: 2021’s OK Human is a baroque-pop collection backed by a full orchestra, while the same year’s metal-inspired Van Weezer recalls the concision and monolithic choruses of the group’s formative work. Cuomo then moved to get almost every other conceivable stylistic experiment out of his system on the following year’s ambitious four-EP SZSN series.

ORIGIN
Los Angeles, CA, United States
FORMED
14 February 1992
GENRE
Alternative

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