Beverly Hills

The opening drum fill here is almost cartoonish in its confidence, announcing a song that has absolutely no interest in being modest about what it is. Beverly Hills runs on a chord progression that feels designed to be played in large outdoor spaces, built for arenas and festival stages and anywhere that benefits from sound bouncing off distant walls. The production is glossy and enormous — layered guitars, a bass that sits right up in the mix, a rhythm track that punches cleanly. Cuomo's vocal is cheerful and slightly detached, delivering the lyric with the tone of someone observing their own absurdity from a comfortable distance. The subject matter is the gap between aspiration and reality, between the world of easy glamour and wealth and the very specific kind of person who watches that world from outside it — but the song doesn't actually want to inhabit that outsider position emotionally. Instead it performs desire without self-consciousness, like someone deciding that wanting a thing loudly is more interesting than pretending not to want it. The chorus is enormous, instantly memorisable, a piece of melodic architecture that goes exactly where you expect it to go and delivers full satisfaction anyway. Culturally this represents a Weezer at peace with its own commercial ambition, no longer interested in the critical identity negotiation of their earlier work. This is a song for driving on a motorway with the window down, or for any moment that calls for volume over nuance.