Out Friday, The Scholars is the first new Car Seat Headrest album in five years – an expansive suite of songs that sweeps seamlessly from majestic glam to The Who-worthy bombast. Today, you can hear the buoyant rock ’n roll tour-diary ‘The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That Man).’
Car Seat Headrest – ‘The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man)’ (Official Lyric Video)
The group will join a sneak-preview listening party on Bandcamp Live to be held on May 1st.
Earlier this month, Will Toledo appeared on the podcast How Long Gone and Paste published a cover story featuring the full group. Writing in Mojo, critic David Fricke blessed The Scholars with a four star review, praising the record as an “audacious, explosive rock opera” and writing “For a guy who used to be so lo-fi he made records in the front seat of his parents’ car, Toledo has a solid grip on arena-rock scale and thrill-ride momentum.”
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 realized 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
“A feast of classic-rock dynamics and whirlwind suites” – Mojo (****)
“These songs are dreams, chapters, folk tales, and explosions, as Car Seat Headrest embody Chaucer, Kerouac, Queen, and David Lynch all at once.” – Paste
TRACKLIST
- CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You)
- Devereaux
- Lady Gay Approximately
- The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man)
- Equals
- Gethsemane
- Reality
- Planet Desperation
- True/False Lover
