Given that many big summer events – such as Glastonbury – have already been forced to cancel, that perhaps looks unlikely, but Cuomo says that as far as he’s been told, the tour is still on.

The release of ‘Van Weezer’, originally planned for last spring, was thus put back to 7 May this year, in line with the rescheduled dates for the Hella Mega Tour, which at the time of going to press is still apparently set to open in Vienna on June 9. “When nobody is going to concerts, how can you possibly promote a stadium rock album?” “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,” says Cuomo, choking back an exasperated laugh.

Sensibly, or so it seemed at the time, the band shelved their introspective album-to-be in favor of writing and recording ‘Van Weezer’, a collection of stadium-ready air guitar anthems inspired by their shared teenage love of Kiss, Black Sabbath, Metallica and, of course, Van Halen. It was just as that record was nearing completion that the band – Cuomo plus drummer Patrick Wilson, rhythm guitarist Brian Bell and bassist Scott Shriner – learned that they’d been booked to play the Hella Mega Tour, a huge jaunt around the world’s stadiums alongside fellow rockers-of-a-certain-age Green Day and Fall Out Boy, from March to August last year.Ĭuomo says their excitement at hitting the road to play in front of such vast crowds was tempered by an immediate and troubling realization: “We were like, ‘Okay, we just made the worst possible type of album you could make before a stadium rock tour.’” It all started in 2017, when Cuomo sat down in that same spot at his piano, beneath his hanging garden of creeping vines, to begin work on what he calls a “quirky, personal, non-commercial album with no big guitars”. The moustachioed 50-year-old Weezer frontman is at home in Santa Monica, sitting between his computer and his piano, explaining the sequence of unforeseen circumstances that led his band to delay the release of heavy metal record ‘Van Weezer’ by a full year and in the intervening time put out a whole new orchestral pop album, ‘OK Human’. Rivers Cuomo is a man of many talents, but clairvoyance is not one of them.

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