In August, Car Seat Headrest returned to Seattle’s KEXP to tape a live session, to-date their only in-studio performance around the release of new album The Scholars. Initially a one-time live stream, that session is today arriving on the internet more-or-less permanently via the station’s archive. Fresh from a summer of cathartic live dates, the band blast through four new songs – ‘Lady Gay Approximately,’ ‘The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man),’ ‘Gethsemane,’ and the 20-minute multi-movement epic, ‘Planet Desperation.’ Watch below.
In May of 2020, Car Seat Headrest (frontman Will Toledo, lead guitarist Ethan Ives, drummer Andrew Katz, and bassist Seth Dalby) released their album Making a Door Less Open, right as the world shut down. This led to a long period of enforced inactivity. When they were finally able to tour in 2022 they were delighted that their audience was now younger than ever, thanks to a new generation discovering their coming-of-age classics Teens of Denial and Twin Fantasy.
However, the band was soon sidelined again, this time due to illness. This hiatus resulted in a sustained period of contemplation and reflection for Toledo, which ultimately shaped The Scholars. Inspired by an apocryphal poem by Archbishop Guillermo Guadalupe del Toledo, and featuring character designs from Toledo’s friend, the cartoonist Cate Wurtz, the album focuses on the yearning and spiritual crisis of the titular Scholars. They range from the doubt-filled playwright Beolco to Devereaux, a person born to religious conservatives who finds themselves desperate for higher guidance. Meanwhile, the music draws, carefully, from classic rock story song cycles such as The Who’s Tommy and David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
Self-produced by Toledo, the band have never sounded more fully realised or assured of themselves. And while Car Seat Headrest started as Toledo’s solo project, it is now fully a band. “It didn’t really feel to me like things got in sync in an inner feeling way until this record, with that internal communal energy,” he explains. “That’s been a big journey.”
Praise for Car Seat Headrest
“The Scholars is a band laying out the impulses and fascinations that they’ve been leaning into for their entire career, and letting themselves fall in headfirst.” – Stereogum
“Completely career-turning” – FLOOD
“They just make the coolest, most epic, ambitious guitar rock of pretty much any band in the past decade plus.” – NPR Music
“It’s the most directly pleasurable Car Seat Headrest album in a while, packed with anthemic choruses and satisfying live-band crunch.” – Rolling Stone
“Car Seat Headrest sounds just as unstoppable as in their late-2010s glory.” – Vulture
“a rock opera that is destined to stand with landmark recordings from previous decades” – Billboard
Car Seat Headrest
The Scholars
TRACKLIST
1. CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You)
2. Devereaux
3. Lady Gay Approximately
4. The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man)
5. Equals
6. Gethsemane
7. Reality
8. Planet Desperation
9. True/False Lover
