Weezer, “SZNZ: Summer.”

Writer Ray Bradbury once advised young authors to “Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.” Never ones to rest on their laurels, Weezer seems determined to put that axiom to the musical test. SZNS: Summer is the band’s second of four season-inspired albums, written, recorded, and released over the course of a single year. Inspired by Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” SZNS: Summer is a seven-song EP dedicated to all the nerdy stuff frontman Rivers Cuomo associates with our warmest months.

Like SZNS: Spring, released way back in March, SZNS: Summer feels like an opportunity for the band to stray a bit from its melodic grunge roots. The album’s opener, “Lawn Chair” begins with a string quartet as Cuomo sings, “Cool, kicking back in your lawn chair.” The calm summer vibe is shattered a minute in, however, by a wall of distorted guitar and pummeling drums over which Cuomo sings, “Well I’m gonna stand up and call you out/ You’re a punk ass/ Oh my God!”

Cuomo’s patented brand of plainspoken emotional vulnerability is still there, but the psychological urgency of the Blue Album and Pinkerton seems to have been replaced by a kind of ironic, almost vocational indifference. It’s as if, 30 years after releasing some of the most intense and evocative emo rock ever made, Cuomo and Weezer now approach music as a problem to solve rather than a vehicle for their own catharsis.

The band also does a fair amount of shapeshifting on the record. On a couple songs Weezer seems to channel the slightly more aggressive emo bands that followed it, like My Chemical Romance and Papa Roach. “Blue Like Jazz” kicks off with some scorching guitar scales and hi-hat-heavy blast beats. The angular groove of “The Opposite of Me” feels like more contemporary MTV musical fair if, you know, MTV still played music. The question remains: Did Cuomo get his lip pierced, or is he just trying on musical styles the way high school kids experiment with fashion.

With its rhetorical stab at nihilism, “What’s The Good of Being Good” feels the most like a classic Weezer song in terms of subject matter. The song begins with an elaborate string arrangement you might imagine playing in a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial as the legion of bakers file into their stores in the dim pre-dawn gloom resigned to once again making the donuts (In yet another soul-destroying revelation, I’ve just learned that Dunkin’ Donuts is just Dunkin’ now. Sigh). But the lush drollery soon gives way to a minimalist drum and bass groove that then rises to a climactic chorus.

“Tell me the good of being good when your best friend stabs your back and he lies to the people and drags your good name through the mud,” Cuomo sings.  If that’s an autobiographical song, that sounds rough.

But I don’t think Cuomo is singing about himself here. And that’s kind of the problem. In forcing the band to be prolific, Cuomo and company have strayed from the heart to the head. Listening to the early Weezer albums, fans got a real sense for Cuomo and his struggles. There was something wonderfully relatable in all of that. Listeners could say to themselves, “Wow, this guy is really struggling, what with everybody dissing his girl and everything.” Now listeners are left with the impression that their friend has a tough job and a demanding boss, and that all the deadlines are getting to him.

It’s almost like living in Beverly Hills has a musical downside.