Just mere days ahead of releasing their new unconventional SIXTH self-titled studio album (thirteenth total), frontman Rivers Cuomo spoke to Entertainment Weekly about the new album (titled The Black Album), struggling with the success of covering “Africa,” and so much more.

Cuomo, at one point, says, “My main goal for any album at this point is for it to have at least one song that the audience at our shows every night want to hear.” The fourty-eight year old singer then says that the new album doesn’t have as much guitar as people would think. He explains, “There’s very little guitar. I wrote all the songs on piano. We’ve been trying to make this record for several years. We’ve ended up putting out more normal records, just ’cause we weren’t able to figure this one out.”

He went into talk about Weezer’s latest studio album, Pacific Daydream, which released in 2017 and was nominated for a Grammy. Although the album was nominated and very successful, none of the songs charted as high as the band’s cover of “Africa” by Toto (that ended up on The Teal Album).

He says, “I’ve always thought of myself as an incredibly resilient songwriter. I’ve taken so many hits and had so many failures. And still, I wake up the next morning, and I’m super excited to get back to work. I have complete faith that the next song I write is gonna be a huge song, and the next album is gonna be a huge album, and Weezer is gonna be a big stadium band.”

Weezer is even writing some new, guitar-sounding songs. “What I’ve been working on the last two weeks is back to big guitars,” Cuomo explains. “Blue Album-ish, but a little more riffy. 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.”

Weezer’s newest album, The Black Album, and comes out tomorrow via Crush Music/Atlantic. The full interview is available here.