RIVERS CUOMO has written a whole new Weezer album with one eye on the fans and the other on the spreadsheets — and he’s not pretending otherwise.

The band’s 20th record is another self-titled Weezer (their sixth to share the name), already nicknamed the “Gold Album” by fans thanks to its sleeve colour. Its opening track, CEO, deliberately echoes Undone (The Sweater Song) from 1994, with Cuomo grumbling over a Velvets-ish crawl about being expected to churn out “another 90s jam” instead of doing “something new”. He’s also frank that it let him vent “my frustrations over people wanting me to just write songs about our first two albums”.

CEO arrived right after 2022’s SZNZ project — four albums released across the year, each named for a season. Cuomo says streaming-era data showed that as SZNZ went on, fewer people were listening, prompting him to “think strategically”. Calling from his home in Santa Monica, the 56-year-old says he took several years off releasing new music “to build up demand”, dropped SZNZ-style high concepts and aimed for what he believes the faithful want.

That doesn’t mean he’s switched off his geeky process. Cuomo has long talked up Google Sheets as a key tool, including a much-fabled file called “The Encyclopedia o’ Riffs” to catalogue unused ideas. This time, though, the concept is simple: make an album Weezer diehards will love — with Cuomo treating live shows as the testing ground, chasing songs that sit alongside the hits and still get the room singing.

Musically, he cites Swedish heavy rockers Ghost as a current inspiration for “the power of stadium-rock riffage”, while the record often leans into the loud guitars and pop snap of Weezer’s 1994 debut. And personally, it’s shadowed by older anxieties: CEO’s line about having to “keep this rocket in the sky” points back to the moment Pinkerton (1996) seemed to derail the band’s momentum.

Drummer-guitarist Patrick Wilson, 57, says the Gold Album involved more band collaboration than any previous Weezer release, with Cuomo valuing their unity to face any audience “pushback”. The stakes are familiar for a group that has already survived Pinkerton’s initial flop, a hiatus, and a later fan-led reappraisal that helped propel 2001’s Green Album — a comeback Cuomo credits to listeners who “pulled us out of our self-doubt”.

Weezer is released on 21 August via Reprise/Warner.