Credit: Brendan WalterWe’re getting two new Weezer albums this year, each announced under very different circumstances.
Rivers Cuomo and company first unveiled the details of the guitar-driven Van Weezer in September 2019, along with the announcement of the band’s planned Hella Mega stadium tour with Green Day and Fall Out Boy. Over a year later, Van Weezer hasn’t been released yet, but Weezer announced last week that they’d be dropping another new record, the orchestral OK Human, this Friday.
In an interview with NME, Cuomo reveals that the Van Weezer/OK Human flip-flop was essentially the result of poor timing. As he explains, Weezer had been working on OK Human when they booked the Hella Mega tour.
“We were like, ‘OK, we just made the worst possible type of album you could make before a stadium rock tour,'” Cuomo recalls.
With that in mind, Weezer shifted gears to the Van Halen-influenced Van Weezer, and gave it a May 2020 release date. You know what happens next: the COVID-19 pandemic strikes in the spring of 2020, and the Hella Mega tour gets postponed to this year.
“So we were like: Well, now we’ve just made the worst possible album for a time when you can’t actually tour or perform or rock out,” Cuomo says. “When nobody is going to concerts, how can you possibly promote a stadium rock album?”
That now brings us to OK Human, which Weezer went back and finished amid the pandemic.
“This is probably the best possible time for this album,” says Cuomo. “It’s about feeling isolated and alienated and secluded, so it’s the perfect album for now.”
Van Weezer, meanwhile, is scheduled to arrive this coming May.
By Josh Johnson
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