Welcome to Sleeper Hit Support Group, a column diving into the song currently occupying the bottom spot of the Billboard Hot 100.

In a pop landscape that asks more questions that it answers, I'm setting out to answer three questions about each of these songs: how it got here, if the song is good, and where it's going. In this 100th spot we'll find unlikely ascents, falls from grace, and resurgences of hits from bygone eras.

Today, we're looking at the kismet back-catalog spike of Weezer's "Go Away."

How did it get here?

If you saw the title of today's column and went "wait, what?" I wouldn't blame you. When I saw "Go Away" from Weezer's divisive 9th album, 2014's Everything Will Be Alright In The End, hobble around the bottom of the charts the last several weeks, I was just as confused.

But a random back-catalog spike may be the best thing to happen to Weezer right now. Despite being one of the most successful rock acts this century, Weezer has acted on all of their worst instincts for the past decade, specifically on the flat and uninspired SZNZ EPs, the unnecessary all-covers Teal Album, and whatever the fuck Van Weezer was. On top of the questionable music, the band started leaning heavily into their proximity to meme culture (their bio on every conceivable platform is "You just got Weezered!"). All of these moves have been the mark of a band that has lost touch with what made them celebrated and successful in the first place. We may be seeing a similar fate unravel for Car Seat Headrest as we speak, but I digress.

Everything Will Be Alright In The End is far from the best Weezer album, but it was the album they needed at the time. Coming off their horrid early 2000s run of Make Believe -> Hurley, a "Weezer doing Weezer" kind of record was a welcome treat.

While there's no shortage of geeky nonsense songs on Everything, the record does see Rivers Cuomo reckoning with the state of their career and his relationship with Weezer's fans. Highlight "Back to the Shack" is an outright apology for the musical detours the band had taken in recent years, promising to return to their Blue Album sounding roots. Ironically, it was co-written with pop-machine ghostwriting veteran Jacob Kasher Hindlin, but it seems his writing credit boils down to "...randomly singing out the title while hanging out on the couch listening to [Rivers Cuomo] strumming the song."

Whether Cuomo and co. have kept the promise of "If we die in obscurity, oh well / At least we raised some hell," may reside in the eye of the beholder.

As for Best Coast, Bethany Cosentino started her music career by founding the psych-drone duo Pocahaunted. She was a music-obsessed community college grad that needed a creative outlet after her MySpace demos got the attention of the wrong people, and it remains the most prolific project of her career by a large margin. In its mere five years of activity, Pocahaunted released 13 albums and 10 EPs through boutique DIY labels, most of them only being distributed via cassette.

The LA DIY scene is how Cosentino met her future Best Coast bandmate Bobb Bruno (who is now the bassist for Philly shoegaze band Nothing), and they built their creative relationship through his work producing Pocahaunted's recordings. Nothing about the eerie, experimental sound of the project carried over into Best Coast, but the DIY ethos certainly did.  “We’ve always said: ‘A band could not have tried less to actively become a successful band than us,'” Bruno told Rolling Stone in 2020.

To figure out that music was her true calling, Cosentino took a brief detour in 2008 by moving to NYC to study creative writing at The New School. She realized that path's pitfalls fairly quickly, as she told Stereogum in a 2023 interview:

"I had a ridiculous idea of what it would be like to live in New York and to be a creative writer. I very quickly realized, 'Oh, it's not like 'Sex And The City.' That's not the vibe. This is not going to be a Nora Ephron movie.' But I do think that when I was working, when I got the internship at The Fader, that made me realize: 'Wait, I'm a musician. I want to be a musician. Why am I going to shows and interviewing artists when that's what I do?'

In the same way that I said I'm an intuitive person, something clicked for me where I was like, 'I don't want to be here anymore. I'm just going to go home, and I'm going to start this band.'"

She dropped out of The New School and moved back to LA in 2009, reuniting with Bruno and starting Best Coast. Their first two singles caught the attention of Mexican Summer's label manager, which allowed them the budget to begin working on a full-length album. What resulted was Crazy for You, the record that made Cosentino a bonafide indie starlet in the early 2010s indie surf rock wave. The four Best Coast records that followed (and Cosentino's solo record) ended up living in its shadow, unable to reach the same heights.

While I rebuke the notion that suffering is inherently necessary to make good art, I can't deny that the arid-climate-induced malaise Cosentino brings to this record is what makes the music as compelling as it is. Crazy for You executes on its artistic vision with impressive precision, with many of these songs being written for catharsis against the fresh hell of living with your mother at age 22 and working part-time at Lush.

A few months before the record's release, Cosentio told Pitchfork, "When we walked into the studio, we said: drums are Beatles-esque, guitars are like the Ramones – really punky, messy, and sloppy-sounding – and vocals like Phil Spector." While those are certainly lofty comparisons for a skeptic, the tastefully saccharine, sun-bleached sound the record emits absolutely justifies them.

While many of the emotions that surround the aimlessness of young adulthood are quite complex, the more straightforward highs and lows of infatuation and insecurity are laid out with palpable charm and sincerity. "There are a shitload of songs about being in love with someone who doesn't love you back and I talk about weed and my cat and being lazy a lot. I don't think lyrics need to be deep– just write whatever comes out of you. You don't need to find intense meaning in everything," Cosentino said in that same interview.

That sort of attitude seems to be what caught the ear of Rivers Cuomo. Around the release of Crazy for You is when Cosentino met Cuomo for a writing session. In a recent blog post, she recounted the interaction as follows:

"In 2010 I went out to Santa Monica to meet Rivers Cuomo, who had asked if I wanted to write together. I had basically just started Best Coast and was a recent college dropout, so I was perplexed at why he wanted to write a song with me - but obviously I said yes. I got in my red Ford Focus, which had no AC, and drove across town to meet him. From what I remember, we talked through the idea of a conversational breakup song - two people arguing with each other through the lyrics. It came together pretty quickly; we recorded a demo, and he mentioned they might use it for a future record. Then life moved on."

"Go Away" would sit in the vault for four years. When Cuomo decided to dredge it up for Everything, Cosentino agreed to sing on it, and the song lived the life that you'd expect a single from a mid-career mainstream rock act to live... until now.

About two months ago, "Go Away" went viral on TikTok. There's no definable "trend" or "challenge" behind it; it's just a bunch of teenage girls lip-syncing to Cosentino's verse. Some of them used the song as a vehicle to bemoan their boy problems, others used it to put something in the background of their 'fit check.

So, with all that said...

Is the song any good?

"Go Away" is probably the best song on Everything Will Be Alright In The End (although it's kind of slim pickings). It's a really cute relic of its time, and the vocal chemistry between Cosentino and Cuomo is immensely effective. Their deliveries are equally direct and firm, which allows the song's otherwise unremarkable lyricism to still pack some sort of punch.

The duet's story is an entirely fictional one, with Cuomo playing the role of a boyfriend being told off (by Cosentino) after one too many fuck-ups. The chorus is just a repetition of the title ~a dozen times, but sitting at just over three minutes, "Go Away" makes sure to not overstay its welcome.

Where is it going?

Unlike other songs covered in this column, I don't think "Go Away"'s TikTok resurgence was manufactured. Has Weezer's camp taken the opportunity to capitalize on it since? Certainly. But there's zero reason for Warner Records to put the time and/or money into manufacturing a TikTok trend for an album released on and owned by their competitors (UMG subsidiary Republic) with the part of the song Cuomo doesn't sing on. Regardless, it's Weezer's first Hot 100 entry since their cover of "Africa" by Toto for 2019's Teal Album, and it'd be negligent on their part to ignore that momentum.

After releasing her debut solo record in 2023, Cosentino took a step back from music after finding out she was pregnant. Her 17 month-old daughter Luna was taking a nap when she was informed of "Go Away"'s virility, and made this TikTok as a response to the news.

She seems to be having fun with how surreal it is for a song you wrote to go viral so many years after writing it, and I'd like to believe this was a stroke of karma for being the first artist to call for talent agency founder/CEO and namesake Casey Wasserman to step down after his romantic ties to Ghislane Maxwell surfaced after the release of the Epstein files. If this little moment introduces a new generation to her work, that's perhaps the only positive aspect of TikTok doing its job.

Conversely, Weezer has a new album on the horizon. It seems as though they're trying to get back on critics' good side by tapping Kenneth "Kenny Beats" Blume for production after his work on Geese's Getting Killed received an endless stream of praise. The lead single "Shine Again" came out early last month, and it is by default Weezer's best single in many years.

Perhaps yet another "return to form" is in store, but in the meantime they've been doing some fun little fan engagement events in promotion of their announced tour and their still-unannounced record. Hesitantly, I am rooting for them.

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Sidebar: Leave it to the stereotypically nerdy Weezer fandom to have the best and most user-friendly fan wiki I've ever encountered. Shoutout to its editors for being so thorough. Highly recommend taking a dive if that piques your interest.