Weezer, “SZNZ: Winter.”

Chapter three, verse one of Ecclesiastes tells us, “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.” For Weezer that meant composing, recording and producing one EP per season in 2022.

The resulting song cycle started out with an overgrowth of conceptual material on Spring, released in May; followed in June by a detached and rainless Summer. Falling leaves inspired a return to Weezer basics with the September release of Autumn, the strongest of the year. It turns out the band is still pretty good at just being Weezer, absent all the high concept stuff Rivers Cuomo picked up with his literature degree at Harvard.

The band’s final seasonal installment, Winter, checks all the boxes you’d expect from Cuomo and company. Overdriven power chords and Beach-Boys-esque vocal harmonies? Check out “Iambic Pentameter.” Self-deprecating stories of alienation and unrequited love? Bro, on “Basketball,” Cuomo recounts his gym class horrors. Tongue-in-cheek guitar heroics? On “The One That Got Away,” Cuomo delivers hair-metal-style pick scrapes. Winter‘s got it all.

Now, let me tell you why this troubles me.

And yes, I’m nitpicking here.

The thing about Weezer’s early stuff was that it had this emotional intensity. The urgency, immediacy and authenticity of Cuomo’s suburban ennui was the medium and the message. So to learn that Cuomo and the boys can essentially produce an endless supply of these emotional widgets on a studio assembly line makes them seem less… special.

Winter kicks off with the gentle acoustic guitar of “I Want a Dog,” which is about how Rivers wants a dog (Weezerpedia informs me the Cuomo household adopted two cats last year).

“I want a dog/ ‘Cause he’d try to lick my face/ And he would smile/ When I get home to my place/ I want a dog/ ‘Cause sometimes humans/ Hold it all inside/ I need to feel connected,” Cuomo sings.

The worst fear of every girl obsessed over by Cuomo in his songs would be that the singer’s slightly wonky romantic gestures are ultimately insincere acts of emotional manipulation, rather than awkward steps taken toward a kind of Hallmark self-actualization through the power of love and the luck of finding just the right girl. So the fact that Cuomo can conjure the same kind of lovesick desperation singing about getting a dog makes you wonder.

There are echoes of The Blue Album on SZNZ: Winter. The acoustic guitar subsumed by noisy punk on “Dark Enough To See The Stars” feels like “My Name of Jonas” revisited. The pulsing intensity of “The One That Got Away” feels a bit like “Only in Dreams.” The return to the band’s early sound on the second two SZNS EPs is an improvement on the first two records’ propensity for novelty and concept songs.

Hardcore Weezer fans, the kind that respond to “Beverly Hills” hitting their earholes with, “Thank you, sir. May I have another?” are indeed lucky creatures. They’ve got a whole lot of new material to enjoy, some of which captures the band’s former magic. The rest of us have to decide how much of Cuomo’s adolescent intensity we can fit in our post-pubescent lives.

Follow writer David Gill at Twitter.com/saxum_paternus.