Wiki
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Release Date
7 September 2010
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Length
10 tracks
Hurley is Weezer's eighth studio album, released September 10, 2010 on Epitaph Records Hurley was Weezer's first release since splitting from their previous label, Geffen. The album was announced by Weezer on their Facebook page on August 4, 2010. In an article announcing the album details, Rolling Stone magazine said the album "may be named after the LOST character". In an interview during the US Open of Surfing, guitarist Brian Bell confirmed that Jorge Garcia, who portrayed the character Hugo "Hurley" Reyes on the television show LOST, would be on the album's cover. The first single, "Memories", also had its radio premiere at this event. On September 3, 2010 Karl Koch posted on Weezer's official website about an opportunity for fans to buy the album early: "Hurley will be released on 9/14, but you can hear it and get a hold of it 4 days early on Friday Sept 10 at all PacSun locations in the USA and Puerto Rico." All PacSun locations also had listening parties on that day as well.
After copies of Hurley leaked to the internet and surfaced on peer-to-peer sites, Weezer began streaming it in its entirety on the band's Myspace page.
On September 13, the day before the album's release, the band launched a promotional campaign deemed the Weezer YouTube Invasion. They appeared in more than a dozen YouTube videos, each one created and published by popular YouTubers at the time.
The album was pressed on black vinyl as well as translucent green and bright red vinyl. Some copies of the album on vinyl come with a CD copy as well. The album is alleged to have been scrapped entirely in the middle of production and then finished in a matter of weeks. Karl Koch commented on the album in a 2017 interview with Weezerpedia, admitting that he wasn't around for the Hurley sessions, but heard accounts of the recording process. Said Koch:
"I know it was chaotic. Nobody looks back on that time fondly. I do know that the entire album was almost finished and then pretty much completely scrapped and then started over. But again, the whole process was less than a month… I was just learning about the thing being practically done, and I remember talking to the manager at the time and he was showing me a track list and saying "Well, this is kinda what we have here. It's almost done and it's been a real struggle but we're just about there" and then literally like a few days later finding out, no that's all gone, or mostly gone. So I don't know what happened to make that happened, but then within two weeks it's like "OK, it's done". It's like "Wow, how did that happen?" So I think there was some very frantic, manic working environment, and so I would imagine everybody was somewhat confused at some point, as far as what they were doing and what ended up on what, because if everything got dumped and resurrected in less than two weeks…we're talking about ten or twelve songs." Jorge Garcia met Rivers Cuomo backstage at late night talk show Lopez Tonight, where Weezer and Garcia were both guests that night, on May 12, 2010 while doing press for his television show, LOST. They talked for a while, and Cuomo asked Garcia if he could get a photo taken with him. Garcia was contacted by his manager informing him of Weezer's plan to use a picture of him on the cover of their new album, and was then shown what he thought was a rough draft mock-up of the cover using the photo he took with Cuomo, (albeit blown up and cropped to showcase just Garcia’s face). This ultimately became the final artwork for Hurley.
Cuomo told Spinner.com in an interview, "We struggled super hard trying to come up with an album title, trying to find some kind of phrase that summed up the whole aesthetic behind the album: 'Heavy Mental,' 'Smaller Than Life.' I was coming up with all kinds of stuff, but ultimately, we just went with some random word that doesn't really have anything to do with anything. I just loved this photo of Jorge Garcia - it just had this amazing vibe. We didn't want to do a fourth self-titled record and we knew people would refer to it as 'the Hurley record' even if left it without that title, so we just called it Hurley. No words are on the cover because all we wanted was his amazing face."
This account is in contrary to reports that Weezer had named the album after surf/clothing company, Hurley, which leant one of their studios for at least one session and was at one point rumored to be a financial backer of the album. The "Hurleygate" controversy (as it would come to be known by the allthingsweezer community) was expanded when guitarist Brian Bell seemingly confirmed Hurley's financial stake in the album during an interview prior to the album's release - a statement he would later recant on the official weezer.com message boards.
Karl Koch recalled the process during a chat with members of the Weezer Fan Club over the video conferencing platform Zoom in June of 2020. According to Koch, the clothing deal with the company Hurley was already in the works when the album was being worked on, adding: They did a show and from Lost was there, and they got a photo backstage with him because he was a big, huge fan, and Rivers fell in love with the photo of , who obviously plays the character Hurley. I think it was probably on their plane ride home that night when they were all discussing how crazy all that was, and that subject of "What's are we calling this album? What is the artwork gonna be?" And Rivers just took a look at that photo and he laughed and, because this thing with the clothing had been happening, he said "How about we call it Hurley?" and showed this photo, and it basically was that! There was all this talk about Hurley, Hurley, Hurley, and then we meet Hurley. He just loved that picture of how he was so happy and smiling and was like, "Just put him on the cover, we'll call it Hurley!" And that was bound to create backlash, because it's like "Ohh, Hurley's sponsoring the album!" It's like, actually no, the band paid for all the recording, Epitaph put it out and distributed it, and they happened to have a collaboration with Hurley at the same time, and they met coincidentally…and he knew that was gonna drive people crazy. It was like his first real troll, and it worked! It's still confusing to people ten years later! Hurley received middling reviews and has a score of 68/100 on Metacritic (a critic aggregating website). BBC Music, in their 6/10 review, praise it for playing to the band's strong suits, but criticizes the album for retreading paths already taken: "Everybody should move on after a while." Allmusic praises the album for returning to their basics in their 8/10 review: "Cuomo doesn't suppress his emotion; he just prefers sentiment, but what he loves most of all is a pure pop song and Hurley offers up its fair share." The Guardian was less kind in their two star review, criticizing the lyrics and the continued use of cowriters on many songs.
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