Photo by Brendan Walter
The new Weezer news this week is mostly for people with passports. On Wednesday the band added a batch of international dates to their Weezer: The Gathering tour — Japan in February 2027, Ireland, the UK and mainland Europe in May and June — with Taking Back Sunday opening (Billboard, Consequence).
For Boston, the date that matters hasn’t moved: TD Garden, Sunday, September 27, doors at 6, show at 7, with The Shins and Silversun Pickups supporting. That one’s been on sale since April and is still listed as available — no fan-club hoop-jumping required. Silversun Pickups also have the Garden date up on their own tour page.
The Boston stop sits about three weeks into a 32-date North American arena run that starts September 8 in Sacramento and wraps October 24 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, which is already sold out.
“C.E.O.” and the album
The tour news landed alongside C.E.O. the third single from Weezer, the band’s new self-titled record due August 21 on Reprise/Warner. It follows Shine Again, out in April, and We Might as Well Be Strangers with Wednesday. The song is about the passage of time and the demands of your own internal boss — a subject Rivers Cuomo has circled before.
The video, directed by Brendan Walter and Jasper Graham, is the real draw: Tony Hawk, Curry Barker, Dax Flame, Rob Riggle, Rob Huebel, Michael Peña, Giovanni Ribisi and Christopher Mintz-Plasse all turn up.
The album was made with Klas Åhlund and Kenneth Blume, the producer formerly known as Kenny Beats. The band’s framing is that this is a back-to-basics record cut with all four members in their rehearsal space, with songs written by three of the four — including the first time Cuomo and drummer Pat Wilson built a song together since the Blue Album. Wilson, per Rolling Stone’s July feature, wrote “Shine Again” outright, which is genuinely new territory for a band that has run on Cuomo’s songwriting for three decades.
The presale maze
Most of the fine print in the announcement applies to the new dates, not to us. Weezer Fan Club members get first crack on Tuesday, August 11 at 9 a.m. BST. UK fans who preorder the album from the band’s webstore before 3 p.m. BST on Monday, August 10 get a presale code for August 11 at 10 a.m. BST; EU fans can join a mailing list at weezer.com/eugathering for codes going out the evening of August 10. General on-sale for the UK and EU is Friday, August 14, and Japan goes on sale Saturday, September 5.
That’s four separate registration windows in five days, which is a lot of homework for a Weezer ticket.
A couple of asterisks
The press materials call this Weezer’s 20th album. Depending on how you count, it’s their 16th studio album and 20th release overall — the higher number folds in covers records, the SZNZ EPs and odds and ends.
The label also leans on a Rolling Stone line calling it “one of the best Weezer albums of this century.” That quote is real, but it comes from a July feature interview, not a review of the finished record — worth knowing before you treat it as a verdict.
The release also describes Weezer as an “imagined greatest hits” that’s “urgent and vital as anything else in their catalog.” That’s standard album-rollout language, and comparisons to the Blue Album or Pinkerton are a high bar for any record. The smaller claim is the more interesting one: that Cuomo shared the songwriting this time. We’ll find out how much that changed things on August 21, and again at the Garden on September 27.