weezer

So, Will the New Weezer Album Be Any Good?

There is a moment in the promotional run-up to every Weezer album released this decade at which ever-hopeful music nerds allow themselves to wonder, Will this be the one that’s miraculously as good as the Blue Album and/or Pinkerton? Never mind that the answer is inevitably, “No, it’s not (but it does feature three-to-four pretty good, slickly executed pop-rock songs): It’s a classic rock-and-roll arc — the lapsed heroes reclaiming their early brilliance — and it is irresistible. Anyway, with Weezer’s latest, Hurley, due in September, we find ourselves here once again. The Weez has been busy building up some good vibes thanks to a non-terrible single, the promise of a Ryan Adams feature, this Rivers Cuomo quote about the album’s “raw rock energy,” and an album cover that, holy crap, is just a big picture of Hurley’s face. And then comes this new Cuomo interview with Spin, to maybe put a damper on the party.

Obviously, hearing Rivers talk about the band’s new songs isn’t actually the same as hearing the songs, so we continue to respectfully reserve judgment. Even though that’s really hard to do when he’s explaining a song called “Where’s My Sex” — during which one can’t help but think of the awesome “Tired of Sex” — like this:

I can’t remember now, if it was my two-year-old daughter that said it, or my wife said it, or my wife told me that my daughter said it — it was one of those three things. One of them accidentally said “Where’s my sex” instead of “Where’s my socks” — they couldn’t find their socks. And when I heard them say “Where’s my sex,” I just thought, “That’s a cool song title right there,” so I went and just started writing like crazy. And I wrote all the lyrics. First, I wrote it all about socks, like the song is all about trying to find your socks and how terrible it is when you’re not wearing socks. And then I just went back and changed a few letters in the word and it became a totally different animal.


For the record, “Tired of Sex” was not secretly about socks.

Q&A: Rivers Cuomo of Weezer [Spin]

So, Will the New Weezer Album Be Any Good?