Island in the Sun

The Green Album was Weezer's return after a five-year silence following the critical and commercial failure of Pinkerton — an album Cuomo found painful, subsequently reassessed as a masterpiece. The Green Album was deliberately safer.

Island in the Sun is among its most immediately pleasurable tracks — a summer-afternoon melody, the whole thing committed to nothing more complicated than warmth. It is Weezer at peace with being pleasant, which is not the worst thing a band can be.

The Weezer catalog is one of rock's great argument-generating sequences — the Blue Album and Pinkerton as unassailable peaks, followed by decades of good, great, and baffling work.