Rivers Cuomo is unstoppable.
On Friday, Weezer will release their second album of 2019, The Black Album, which follows this past January’s The Teal Album, their collection of covers that includes their chart-topping Toto’s “Africa”. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, though.
In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Cuomo has confirmed that the band is already hard at work on two more albums, one that’s aimed for the rafters with giant six-string guitars and another that comes from the piano man within.
“What I’ve been working on the last two weeks is back to big guitars,” Cuomo teased. “The working title is Van Weezer. The inspiration came from our live shows, where, in the middle of ‘Beverly Hills’, unlike on the album, everything stops and I just break out with this crazy guitar solo. We noticed that, recently, the crowd just goes crazy when I do that. So it feels like maybe the audience is ready for some shredding again.”
(Read: Weezer’s 10 Best Deep Cuts)
Of the second record, he added, “Van Weezer is in mortal combat with Okay Human, a record that’s mostly done. That one’s totally different. It’s inspired by an album from 1970 called Nilsson Sings Newman. It’s all piano-based, but it has a ton of orchestration. We just did the strings at Abbey Road. It’s just gorgeous melodies and extremely eccentric lyrics.”
Those two records would mark the band’s 14th and 15th to date. What’s more, those two make it eight albums the band have released in this decade alone, which is a staggering increase from the five released in the aughts and the two dropped in the ’90s.
But, who knows, there’s still a lot of time left until 2020.