Car Seat Headrest has unveiled another preview from forthcoming new album Twin Fantasy – a re-recorded, re-imagined new version of the 2011 self-released Bandcamp masterpiece of the same name – which will be released February 16th on Matador Records. The track was featured as Zane Lowe’s World Record on Beats 1.
Album opener ‘My Boy (Twin Fantasy)’ commences with the sparse declaration of “my boy, we don’t see each other much,” and blossoms into a towering climax, with the life-affirming mantra of “It’ll take some time, but somewhere down the line / We won’t be alone” standing as the statement-of-intent for the record’s exhilarating, adventurous sonic and emotional world.
Following the release of singles ‘Beach Life In Death’, ‘Nervous Young Inhumans’ (with its accompanying video that marked Toledo’s directorial debut) and ‘Cute Thing’ (premiered on BBC 6 Music), Twin Fantasy is already shaping up as one of this year’s most anticipated releases.
See Car Seat Headrest Live at Auckland City Limits, Western Springs – March 2.
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Toledo always knew he would return to Twin Fantasy. He never did complete the work. Not really. Never could square his grand ambitions against his mechanical limitations. Listen to his first attempt, recorded at nineteen on a cheap laptop, and you’ll hear what Brian Eno fondly calls “the sound of failure” – thrilling, extraordinary, and singularly compelling failure. Will’s first love, rendered in the vivid teenage viscera of stolen gin, bruised shins, and weird sex, was an event too momentous for the medium assigned to record it.
Even so, even awkward and amateurish, Twin Fantasy is deeply, truly adored. Legions of reverent listeners carve rituals out of it: sobbing over “Famous Prophets,” making out to ‘Cute Thing’, dancing their asses off as ‘Bodys’ climbs higher, higher. The distortion hardly matters. You can hear him just fine. You can hear everything. And you can feel everything: his hope, his despair, his wild overjoy. He’s trusting you – plural you, thousands of you – with the things he can’t say out loud. “I pretended I was drunk when I came out to my friends,” he sings – and then, caught between truths, backtracks: “I never came out to my friends. We were all on Skype, and I laughed and changed the subject.”
You might be imagining an extended diary entry, an angsty transmission from a bygone LiveJournal set to power chords and cranked to eleven. You would be wrong. Twin Fantasy is not a monologue. Twin Fantasy is a conversation. You know, he sings, that I’m mostly singing about you. This is Will’s greatest strength as a songwriter: he spins his own story, but he’s always telling yours, too. Between nods to local details – Harper’s Ferry, The Yellow Wallpaper, the Monopoly board collecting dust in his back seat – he leaves room for the fragile stuff of your own life, your own loves. From the very beginning, alone in his bedroom, in his last weeks of high school, he knew he was writing anthems. Someday, he hoped, you and I might sing these words back to him.
“It was never a finished work,” Toledo says, “and it wasn’t until last year that I figured out how to finish it.” He has, now, the benefit of a bigger budget, a full band in fine form, and endless time to tinker. According to him, it took eight months of mixing just to get the drums right. But this is no shallow second take, sanitized in studio and scrubbed of feeling. This is the album he always wanted to make. It sounds the way he always wanted it to sound.
It’s been hard, stepping into the shoes of his teenage self, walking back to painful places. There are lyrics he wouldn’t write again, an especially sad song he regards as an albatross. But even as he carries the weight of that younger, wounded Toledo, he moves forward. He grows. He revises, gently, the songs we love so much. In the album’s final moments, in those “apologies to future me’s and you’s,” there is more forgiveness than fury.
This, Toledo says, is the most vital difference between the old and the new: he no longer sees his own story as a tragedy.
He’s not alone no more.
– Peyton Thomas
Twin Fantasy – Tracklist:
3. Stop Smoking (We Love You)
4. Sober to Death
6. Bodys
7. Cute Thing
8. High to Death
9. Famous Prophets (Stars)
10. Twin Fantasy (Those Boys)
* Twin Fantasy Pre-Order info:
February 16:
-Twin Fantasy (2017 version) double LP
-Twin Fantasy (2017 version) and Twin Fantasy – Mirror To Mirror (re-mastered 2011 version) double CD
–Twin Fantasy (2017 version) digital album
April 21:
-Record Store Day exclusive of Twin Fantasy – Mirror To Mirror (re-mastered 2011 version) double LP
TBD 2018:
–Twin Fantasy – Mirror To Mirror (re-mastered 2011 version) digital album
