OK Human

The complete departure from Weezer’s usual formula of distorted electric guitars and pop rock will almost certainly be divisive amongst the band’s incredibly dedicated fanbase. But ‘OK Human’ undeniably contains some of the Weezer’s catchiest songs Weezer have put out in their entire career.

An unlikely masterpiece. [Apr 2021, p.89]

OK Human lands as a surprisingly charming collection of pop tunes whose imperfections add to rather than detract from the experience.

It’s the same melodies and patterns as the group have long favoured, but even the potentially cringeworthy ‘Screens’ (a song about, of course, how we’re all glued to them) barely raises a shrug when surrounded by such luscious, bombastic sounds. By focusing on minutiae, too, what is ostensibly a lockdown album (hello, reference to Zoom interviews) avoids cliche.

The problem with OK Human isn't that Cuomo makes a facepalm-inducing Kim Jong-un reference and rhymes sad with bad, it's that there's not enough genuine pathos to outweigh the places where he can't help himself. Instead, the fleeting moments of authenticity are hidden beneath a pile of hokey one-liners, spotty vocal performances, and awkward arrangements that rely on the accompanying orchestra to provide all of the emotional depth.

With 12 tracks and a runtime of barely more than half an hour, any flaws are minor and the album breezes by. The arrangements may be ambitious, but there's very little pomp or grandeur here; this is just another low-stakes success in a long and varied career.

it is a wonderful thing to hear Weezer still actually sounding like Weezer here. That they’ve achieved this while pushing their creative boundaries with an orchestra only underlines it. And the best part is, when the time is right and we go back to stadiums again, they’ve still got what promises to be the perfect album to celebrate with left in the chamber.

It's Numbers that punches hardest, it's compassionate message about the futility of measuring ourselves against others deftly handled. [Apr 2021, p.86]

Weezer have made one of their most catchy and insightful records to date.

Weezer have delivered an album that’s intimate, thoughtful and resolutely human.

Weezer’s maddeningly inane lyrics sometimes work, but they aren’t doing much to move the needle here. At least the album sounds nice, as that’s more than you could say for plenty of previous albums from Cuomo and the gang. We might as well enjoy it.

Weezer has always had heart, and OK Human shows the value of taking time to record instead of filling the silence with countless tours and albums. Weezer is finally taking risks outside of the formula that has worked so well, and they still have a lot of mileage left in them.

The common threads celebrities try to establish with civilians have proven to be pretty flimsy throughout the past year, but they’re enough to give OK Human an emotional binding missing from nearly every album they’ve made in the past 20 years.

If you're partial to the band's most commercially palatable work—Green Album, Make Believe, Pacific Daydream, etc—OK Human won't necessarily tick that box for you either. On the contrary, the new material presents Weezer in a new light for the first time in over a decade—no small feat for a band that looked to be in a creative rut, with no surprises left up its sleeve. If nothing else, OK Human proves that you can never count Weezer out.

Cuomo’s habit of describing how he feels, instead of fusing his emotions directly to the songs (as lyricist Tony Asher did with Brian Wilson), gets in the way of OK Human becoming a breakthrough.

OK Human is an oddity and a warm digital hug; it's Weezer reacting to an endless, nerve-shredding, social-life-destroying period of isolation the way only Weezer can, drawing further inwards to themselves but somehow inviting us along for the ride.

It’s solid, in other words—which isn’t damning with faint praise, rather affirming that Weezer is nailing this material. It’s in the slower, more balladry-driven songs that OK Human (the latest in a long line of stupid reference-heavy album titles, this time nodding at Radiohead’s classic) finds its openly beating heart.

Weezer’s greatest misses may come from their frontman’s visceral desperation to stay relevant, but it’s a relief to hear them take chances and risk failure in such a new way. The album might just be OK, but it’s been a long time since Weezer have dared to be this human.

The record isn’t groundbreaking material, but it’s definitely nice to have a new Weezer album that isn’t trying to recreate their old material and instead looks to the future of their sound.