Each Thursday in Dust Off the Vinyl, I’ll take a retrospective look at a classic album in order to provide insight into defining works of genres or eras.

Weezer’s Pinkerton is a cult classic rock album that takes a self destructive turn away from their previous effort, the fan favorite Blue Album. Pinkerton was their second effort as a band, but is in many ways a de-evolution of their previous efforts and sounds. Blue was produced by Ric Ocasek of the Cars, and while it dealt with some of frontman Rivers Cuomo’s personal issues. That said, it felt somewhat wide-eyed and naive with how it viewed the world through the lense of Cuomo’s storytelling, while Cuomo produced Pinkerton himself and practically laid out his personality and life stories straight down onto the songs he wrote.

It’s hard to view Cuomo as a relatable character on this album considering how dark and borderline creepy some of the lyrics are, but in some ways what he’s saying is relatable just due to the truthfulness of what he’s admitting about himself. On songs like “Why Bother?” and “Tired of Sex,” he sings about one night stands with groupies and not wanting to get romantically close to any women. On “Across the Sea” and “Pink Triangle,” he talks about wanting what he can’t have, one of the songs being about a letter he received from an 18-year-old girl in Japan and another being about a girl he fell in love with who turned out to be a lesbian. “El Scorcho” is practically about being a stalker, fixated on a girl who “won’t talk, won’t look, won’t think of [him],” literally sneaking into her house to read her diary, saying “I’m a lot like you so please, hello, i’m here, i’m waiting.”

However, all these experiences and moods come together to make Pinkerton what it is: an exploration of the dark sides of a person and an artistic output for Rivers Cuomo’s personal issues. He actually responded to concerns about the lyrics on the album in a letter to his fanclub, saying “There are some lyrics on the album that you might think are mean or sexist. I will feel genuinely bad if anyone feels hurt by my lyrics but I really wanted these songs to be an exploration of my ‘dark side’ – all the parts of myself that I was either afraid or embarrassed to think about before. So there’s some pretty nasty stuff on there. You may be more willing to forgive the lyrics if you see them as passing low points in a larger story.”

The masterpiece of Pinkerton is in the way it delivers dark feelings and thoughts in a way that both makes them relatable and creates an entire mood and attitude out of them. As mentioned earlier, the album was self produced by Cuomo rather than an outside producer, making it feel more raw and grungy, which is the way these songs should be delivered; they aren’t happy or shiny, and the mixing reflects that. The guitars are loud and distorted and the bass and drum lines are crammed up against them, with Cuomo’s voice ranging from low almost talking that permeates the instrumentation to screaming over the noise of the rest of the band.

When you consider the context of Pinkerton, the emotion present makes perfect sense: it was recorded when Cuomo was studying at Harvard, and he’s described it as one of the lowest points in his life. Cuomo himself has even at one point described the songs and album as “diseased,” which, although said negatively, is honestly a pretty good summation of the energy present on Pinkerton. This is an album that takes a screenshot of an artist at his absolute lowest, and the honest display of negativity and bad attitudes makes Pinkerton an absolutely essential rock album.