On the back of a triumphant UK tour and sold-out show at London’s Roundhouse, Car Seat Headrest has announced a live return to the UK in November for his biggest headline shows to date.
The four-date run will see the band performing in Cardiff, Nottingham and Manchester, culminating in a headline show at London’s O2 Brixton Academy on November 8, before continuing to further European dates.
The band will be bringing the expansive sound of their new album Twin Fantasy – a re-recorded, re-imagined version of Car Seat Headrest’s 2011 classic – to the stage, the band has expanded to a seven-piece, featuring two drummers, three guitarists, a bassist, and Will Toledo confidently stepping into centre stage as frontman.
Car Seat Headrest performing live in the KEXP studio. Recorded April 24th, 2018.
Songs: Uncontrollable Urge Fill In The Blank Sober To Death / Powderfinger Bodys
Will 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 Bodysclimbs higher, higher. The distortion hardly matters. You can hear him just fine. You can hear everything. And you can feeleverything: 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 Fantasyis 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.
Early next year, Car Seat Headrest will release a new version of Twin Fantasy. “It was never a finished work,” Will 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 Will, 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, Will says, is the most vital difference between the old and the new: he no longer sees his own story as a tragedy. From the new ‘Twin Fantasy’ available February 16th on Matador Records
Car Seat Headrest, aka Will Toledo, has re-imagined and re-recorded his excellent 2011 Bandcamp masterpiece, Twin Fantasy, and it will come out on 16th February via Matador Records. It was a record Toldeo always knew he would return to (in fact it was part of his original deal with Matador), so far from a conventional re-recording, the follow up to 2016’s seismically brilliant Teens of Denial is a wholly revelatory, epic and visionary new work. With a seven-piece band in tow (including members of Naked Giants), Car Seat Headrest will bring its explosive and revelatory live show to Australia, Europe, and select West Coast cities through the first half of 2018.
The album announcement comes with the release of Nervous Young Inhumans and its accompanying video, which can be seen below. It is a frenetic, anthemic, split-screen choreographed crescendo that perfectly mirrors the album’s theme of duality.
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.
For a singer who’s sought privacy in the parking lot of a Target so he could record vocals in the backseat of his car, Will Toledo hasn’t been shy about sharing his work. By age 23, he’d already released a dozen albums. Toledo, who records under the name Car Seat Headrest, is prolific but never conventional. He performed this Tiny Desk Concert mostly solo — with occasional input from his nearby Leesburg, Va., friends and Seattle band mates — for a set that represents only a tiny sliver of what you’ll find on a Car Seat Headrest album. Those records can be filled with rich textures, chaos and harmony, sometimes in the same few minutes. But what you’re about to discover here is a wordsmith with a vision, wrapping his faults and frailties in a DIY sound that’s still finely crafted. Teens Of Style is available now
Set List: “The Drum” “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” “Sober To Death”
You may recall that Car Seat Headrest released an alternative mix of “War Is Coming (If You Want It)” as part of Bandcamp’s Transgender Rights Benefit a few weeks back. The official version of the single is now out and main man Will Toledo says simply, “This is a song about not murdering people.” Bandcamp proceeds of this new version will continue to go towards the Transgender Law Center .
Car Seat Headrest, who recently played festivals in Osheaga and Lollapalooza are currently on tour in Europe,
Car Seat Headrest have shared an acoustic cover of the Smiths classic song “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore.” A representative for the band have confirmed the legitimacy of the recording. In addition to his own output singer-songwriter Will Toledo has covered some of rock’s biggest names. Last year, alongside his stellar album “Teens Of Denial” album, he offered updates on David Bowie’s “Blackstar” Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android”, and Sufjan Stevens’ “Impossible Soul” .
Take a listen below. The song originally appeared on the Smiths’ second album, Meat is Murder, released in 1985. Last month, Car SeatHeadrest toured the UKbehind their excellent 2016 album “Teens Of Denial” , which was one of our best albums of 2016 .
Teens of Denial is the thirteenth album in Car Seat Headrest’s (aka 23-year-old Will Toledo) and the second on Matador Records, and the first to be recorded in a proper studio with a full band and producer (Steve Fisk). On Denial, Toledo moves from bedroom pop to something approaching classic-rock grandeur and huge (if detailed and personal) narrative ambitions, with nods to the Cars, Pavement, Jonathan Richman, Wire, and William Onyeabor. By turns tender and caustic, empathetic and solipsistic, literary and vernacular, profound and profane, self-loathing and self-aggrandizing, he conjures a specifically 21st century mindset, a product of information overload, the loneliness it can foster, and the escape music can provide. At the heart of the album sits the 11:32 Ballad of the Costa Concordia, which has more musical ideas than most whole albums (and at that length, it uses them all). Horns, keyboards, and elegant instrumental interludes set off art-garage moments; vivid vocal harmonies follow punk frenzy. The selfish captain of the capsized cruise liner in the Mediterranean in 2013 becomes a metaphor for struggles of the individual in society, as experienced by one hungover young man on the verge of adulthood.
Will plays guitar while a guy has a bad time. From the new album “Teens Of Denial”,
A dapper Will Toledo and his band made their network TV debut on last night’s Late Show, performing “Fill in the Blank,” the opener from their excellent record Teens of Denial. Car Seat Headrest were “decent at best,” at least to hear their taped-up bass drum tell it.
Truth be told, the performance is a little rough around the edges, but it’s a joy to see a talented band making good—there’s no question this appearance will introduce Toledo and co., who have thus far built most of their following on the internet, to a whole new, TV-watching audience.
Watch Car Seat Headrest “Fill in the Blank” above, and find out where Teens of Denial landed on Paste’s list of the year’s best albums so far
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’sBandcamp 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.
Car Seat Headrest was one of the favorite new acts last year, finally breaking into the public consciousness after making 13 albums self-recorded albums in a five-year period. Today, he announced that he’ll stay on his prolific pace by setting his new LP, Teens of Denial, for a May 20th release via Matador Records. For context, his outstanding Teens of Style came out just five months ago, when we profiled him in Bands to watch.
The first single “Vincent,” with you, and as “Vincent” is chaotic, “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales,” the album’s second single, is equally heartrending. Will Toledo, the songwriting engine behind Car Seat Headrest, said the song is about “post-party melancholia. Wishing to either be a better person or care less about the whole deal. Going home alone, in poor condition. The ‘killer whales’ bit is inspired by Blackfish, which is a depressing film.” Check out the music video below.
The Fat Angel Sings 