More about: Weezer

Ever since Rivers Cuomo first announced it, Weezer’s SZNZ project – comprising of four Vivaldi-inspired EPs, released on the first day of each new season – has been the source of intense speculation in the band’s fanbase.

What shape would it take? Would the project coalesce or prioritise divergence? Would it be a creative bridge too far to release 28 songs in one year? The initial answers provided by SZNZ: Spring only seemed to generate more questions – especially when Cuomo followed up the straightforward, playful, folksy pop of Spring by promising fans on his Discord server that SZNZ: Summer would be chiefly formed of ambitious, bitter, indignant rock songs.

And after hearing Summer’s bitter, indignant rock songs, it’s become clear that, while they’ll each end up sharing the same title, and while they will each endeavour to interpolate fragments of Four Seasons into their melodies, each SZNZ project will definitely have its own independent, very specific, intentions. The project will eventually achieve overall cohesion through purposeful discord. And Summer’s intentions appear to be scale, volume, and size.

We begin with ‘Lawn Chair’. Rivers and a lone violin mimic more of Vivaldi’s melodic flourishes and, at first, appear to wave a contemplative farewell to Spring. But then the lyrical content shifts – opening line “Cool, kicking back in your lawn chair” soon becomes “Hey guys, we should torture the humans / Yes, why don’t we do it?” – and suddenly the full band crashes in unlike anything we heard on the first EP.

Aside from lead single ‘Records’ – the catchy but undercooked lead single that sounds completely out of place here both musically and conceptually – the rest of Summer maintains a combination of force, scale, and ambition that’s been missing since 2016’s The White Album or 2014’s Everything Will Be Alright in the End. (It should be stressed here that OK Human is a near-perfect record, but “force” isn’t in its interests). ‘Blue Like Jazz’ pits gnarly, discordant riffs against a fierce, waltzing rhythm section. It’s all played with real resentment and umbrage, as Rivers tells the story of two friends (the SZNZ project’s angel protagonists) drifting apart: “My face is red; your bill is due / I see your soul and it's black and blue”.

The EP is a short 24 minutes, but its boundless ideas quickly pile up. Occasionally, it verges into symphonic rock territory. ‘The Opposite of Me’ initially posits itself as a Green Day pastiche, before veering wildly off course into an alternative metal bridge section that sees Rivers painting a cinematic image of crashing thunder and violence (“I’ll be there, right in front of the portico / Blade ready, vengeance on my mind”). It briefly returns to its initial mode before drifting off via repeated chants of “do-do-do” and clean guitar strokes.

‘What’s the Good of Being Good’ then marches in with a brass band and militaristic drum rolls before Rivers spits through his teeth and wonders why the universe never rewards good behaviour. The connective tissue between its second and third choruses is a queasy, meandering vocal bridge that obscures its rhythm deep beneath polyrhythmic gestures while the lyrics uncover the tragic aftermath of an extramarital affair. It anchors its tempo onto nothing in particular and sounds as though it may never end.

The adorkably titled ‘Cuomoville’ (a title that might irritate those who tend to roll their eyes at Weezer these days) picks up after the two angels have parted ways. One heads to Rome, the other to the song’s titular village. Lyrically, I’m not sure how much listeners will glean from ‘Cuomoville’ if they’re not alert to SZNZ’s loose narrative concept, but the sudden dash in the middle-eight from “Feed ‘em to the lions” straight into “Taste your own medicine!” is one of Weezer’s most exhilarating moments for some time and will definitely prick up any complacent ears.

And then there’s closer ‘Thank You and Good Night’, the EP’s own ‘Futurescope Trilogy’, which is one for the all-time Weezer canon. It races through its first half with the kind of speed and guitar heroism that would suit Van Weezer before entering a back half that seems to enter a new section every time you blink. It displays a highly entertaining and unpredictable wealth of epic scale not seen on a Weezer record in almost a decade.

That sense of epic scale managing to squeeze itself into 24 minutes is a shining achievement that feels reminiscent of Cuomo’s Ecce Homo sessions – a brief era after 2010’s Hurley when he outlined (and then partially shelved) a five-act, 16-song rock opera about a character named Sebastian who existed through several periods of human history. Like, the Ecce Homo demos that have surfaced since 2012, the majority of Summer resembles what we get when Cuomo is (mostly) left to his own devices – a slightly self-indulgent, occasionally goofy, but always artful and multifaceted musical experience that reminds us why he remains such an enigmatic and baffling songwriter after all this time.

If there’s one great shame of Summer, it’s that the production often fails to suit the material by being clumsily overproduced in places where it perhaps needs to rein itself in to suit stripped back surroundings (‘Records’), a little thin when it might as well go into the red (‘The Opposite of Me’), and always, always too loud on the drums. The snare could cut glass. But crucially, it doesn’t spoil the broth.

The next SZNZ project is likely to go in another unexpected direction from here. For Fall (or Autumn), Cuomo has promised “dance rock, like Franz Ferdinand”. For Winter, Elliot Smith. By the time this SZNZ project is complete, we may only have more questions. But regardless of that, what we’ll have by winter solstice is a permanent, preserved example of what the ideas that fizz behind Rivers Cuomo’s eyes when he’s locked inside his house for two years.

SZNZ: Summer is out now.

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More about: Weezer