You may love or hate Weezer's 'Feels Like Summer' - and that's ok - but regardless, it's part of who they are

Weezer are allowed to do what they want. Yep, we still have to say this. Unlike any other band, there’s an expectation that California’s favourite four piece should remain the same forever, preserved in surf wax and thick rims, always pushing to get back to that promised land of what, at the time, was their least commercially successful moment. There’s no point fighting it, it’s what ‘we’ - the collective - want. But they don’t owe us it. Because actually, Weezer are so much more than the ‘Buddy Holly’ band. You may have cried your eyes out to ‘Pinkerton’, but salty tears don’t keep anything fresh for long. And so it doesn’t matter if ‘Feels Like Summer’ is awful or a bonafide summer banger. We’re the ones that owe them the chance to push both sides of their artistic id. Though the iconic Weezer is that mid-90s throwback to a throwback, that’s barely half of their output to date - much less if you're being picky. The other, more critically maligned part has seen Rivers Cuomo chasing the zeitgeist like a race car speeding towards the horizon and a setting sun. That pop magpie tendency is what created Weezer’s signature sound in the first place, but it also means that they’re a band who will frequently find themselves pulled in other directions. They watch what is popular. They need to speak to their fellow kids to keep those Vitamin D levels pushing high. Weezer can never get old. To stand still for too long would be to die.

When interviewed about last year’s self-titled White album, the band were freely talking about its inverted musical counterpart - Black - which they suggested may follow in a year or so’s time. If ‘Feels Like Summer’ is the first taste of that, it fits the bill. The flipped coin on their split personality, it’s a radio-friendly chart banger - everything that 2014’s ‘Back To The Shack’ rallied against. It’s heard and understood the attraction of Twenty One Pilots, and realises how it links back to the world Weezer helped create. It’s by a man who has toured and worked with Panic! At The Disco, and contributed to Charli XCX’s ‘Sucker’. It’s still Weezer, but only in part. It’s a bank job on the locked vault, complete with the messy shootout on the way out. It could be brilliant. It could be brilliantly awful. Subjective perception has always been nine-tenths of Weezer’s rap sheet. Despite the fact they’ve shown us they can still be that beloved band, and suggested that they understand it’s what the fans want, the state of the Weezer nation will only ever be judged on their last song. There’s little doubt they’ll return to that classic template again, either. Regardless of the Very Big Opinions that might follow, Rivers and co. should never feel trapped by the expectations of others, however bold their uppercase type reads. We don’t have to love everything, but equally, we don’t have to hate just because it doesn’t fit one narrow definition of what the band can be. We can pick our poison, but without one part, the other can’t exist. Like the ‘Raditude’ dog, Weezer, run free. Own it. To do anything else would to stop being Weezer at all.