Since Will Toledo’s 2015 breakthrough, Teens of Style, he’s been playing to growing crowds (including at Hype Hotel) and prepping a proper follow-up LP, titled Teens Of Denial from which comes this new single. “Both gutsily-honest and damned catchy,” . in a few weeks, Matador will release Car Seat Headrest’s new album, and expectations loom large and heavy. I was really writing full songs, or before I knew how to play any musical instruments, I was writing lyrics and coming up with fake tracklists for albums.” He got his first guitar in junior high, and by the time he got to high school he’d filled a journal and half with song ideas. Next, it was a laptop and a drum kit with which he started making albums, giving them to his friends when they were completed. “It wasn’t really making an impact, and people weren’t listening to it,” he says. “So I started Car Seat Headrest just as a purely online thing.”
How’s this for a generational statement: Will Toledo is a depressed, directionless fuck-up with nothing to show for himself besides his good taste and incisive wit, both of which he liberally applies to the mountainous terrain that is guitar-driven indie-rock history until he’s chiseled his own dour visage into the landscape, Mount Rushmore style. Even though Car Seat Headrest’s Bandcamp page is more than a dozen releases deep, the momentous Teens Of Denial feels like a coming-out party for slacker music’s latest poet laureate. Just when his genre seemed to have fizzled out, Toledo has grabbed the torch from his heroes and set it ablaze again.
The Fat Angel Sings 