OK Human by Weezer

OK Human, Weezer's fourteenth studio album, arrived on January 29, 2021 on Crush and Atlantic, and it's the least likely left turn of their career: the crunch traded for a 38-piece orchestra, analogue gear from top to bottom, and the band reaching for the lush chamber pop of Harry Nilsson's Nilsson Sings Newman and the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds. Jake Sinclair, who'd worked on the White Album, produced it, with Suzy Shinn handling extra vocal production.

With Rivers Cuomo, Patrick Wilson, Brian Bell and Scott Shriner all aboard, it plays like a stack of pocket symphonies, wry and wistful, strings swooping where the power chords used to be. "All My Favorite Songs" led the way that January. Critics warmed to it, it reached 41 on the Billboard 200, and just four months later the band swung the other way entirely with the hard rock of Van Weezer.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.