On May 2nd, Car Seat Headrest will release The Scholars, a bold new rock opera and the band’s first studio album in five years. Today, you can hear the record’s soaring, uplifting opener ‘CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You)’, following its premier by Huw Stephens on BBC 6 Music. Watch the video, featuring illustrations of the characters who appear across The Scholars designed by cartoonist Cate Wurtz.
Set at the fictional college campus Parnassus University, the album’s songs are populated with students and staff whose travails illuminate a loose narrative of life, death, and rebirth. Here’s what the band has to say about the character at the center of ‘CCF’:
Beolco is a student of Parnassus University, a college founded in ages past by a famed playwright known as the Scop. Beolco is deeply fond of both the college and the Scop, believing himself to be spiritually connected or reincarnated from the playwright. He yearns for confirmation of this secret belief.
Last month, Car Seat Headrest posted the album’s first single, ‘Gethsemane’, which went on to the BBC 6 Music playlist. The New York Times described it as “an 11-minute suite that ponders faith, morality, creativity, free will and love as the music unfurls with stretches of kraut-rock keyboard minimalism and roaring power chords that echo the Who’s Tommy.” Listen HERE.
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.”
Car Seat Headrest
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
