car seat headrest teens of denial full album download Car Seat Headrest Conquer Graduation Jitters With New Album ‘Teens of Denial’ The Seattle-based lo-fi dynamo takes us through the genesis of his first studio record. Will Toledo, the main brain behind Car Seat Headrest, is glad that it’s not 2013 anymore. A few years ago, the bedroom-pop luminary was in a “purgatorial” state as he prepared to graduate from Virginia’s College of William & Mary, where many of his friends from the class ahead had left to figure out post-college life. Toledo, a Virginia native, was afraid that he wouldn’t. “I knew there wasn’t an office job I wanted to jump into or anything, or a career, other than music,” the 23-year-old tells SPIN over the phone from his current home of Seattle. “That’s hard to prepare for when you’re graduating college.” It was during this liminal period when Toledo wrote the bulk of his forthcoming record, Teens of Denial , which arrives May 20 via Matador and follows last year’s similarly named compilation record, Teens of Style . Before his signing with the New York- and London-based label, though, Toledo had been writing a series of melancholic, self-deprecating songs as Car Seat Headrest ever since his transition from high school to college in 2010. Over time, they amounted to 11 albums on Bandcamp. Ironically, while writing what would become his first label-released full-length, Toledo was dissatisfied with his progress. “[Writing Teens of Denial ] was actually one of the longest processes I’ve had of writing an album,” he says. “I wasn’t writing anything I was happy with. I had a bunch of stuff to deal with and life plans to make and amongst all of that, I just wasn’t in the right emotional state to really be writing music and be happy about it.” But Toledo continued to write, usually while doing everyday things like biking through colonial Williamsburg to get to class during his senior year at William & Mary. From there, he got the gentle album closer “Joe Goes to School” — one of the many points where his mononym’d alter ego appears. Toledo explains he first found “Joe” by Googling the phrase “Teens of Denial” to ensure no one else had already used it as an album title. “One of the first results was this About.com article on dealing with teenagers who are in denial — [the song title] ‘(Joe Gets Kicked Out of School for Using) Drugs With Friends’ was a direct quote from that article.” Toledo builds a lot of his lyricism around cherrypicked verbiage from things he reads or friends say in passing. “The other ‘Joe’ song, ‘Joe Goes to School,’ that title came when one of my friends was trying to remember the title of ‘Drugs With Friends,'” he explains. “He was like, ‘And that one song, ‘Joe Goes to School.’ And I’m like, ‘That’s not the title at all, but I like that.'” Though he wrote the majority of Teens of Denial in his old house in Williamsburg, Toledo wouldn’t have a chance to properly record any of it until he picked up and moved across the country to Seattle, where, about a year later, he hired a backing band — guitarist Ethan Ives, drummer Andrew Katz, and bassist Seth Dalby — and Matador took notice of self-recorded albums like How to Leave Town (2014), Nervous Young Man (2013), Twin Fantasy (2011). His new label then hooked Car Seat Headrest up with Pacific Northwest super-producer Steve Fisk (Low, Soundgarden), who recorded Teens of Denial at Soundhouse Recording Studios and Avast! Recording Company, then mixed at his own house just a couple of blocks away from the studios in Ballard, Seattle. “That’s one of the reasons why we worked with Steve,” says Toledo. “Because I wanted to do it locally — I figured it’s our first studio experience, and I wanted to ease into it.” Excited though he was, Toledo, who had always self-produced, needed to adjust to Fisk’s mixing style. “We butted heads a little at first,” Toledo says. “I was trying to do more in the mixing process than he was really used to. That’s when we fell into a rhythm and got used to each other’s styles. I learned to let go and let the album be what it’s gonna be and not keep endlessly tweaking it.” The result is a guitar-heavy collection of sweetly sardonic songs that stretch anywhere from a minute and a half to 11 minutes. And Toledo isn’t shy about his influences, a major one being power-pop vets the Cars, whom he straightforwardly references by working a piece of their 1978 classic “Just What I Needed” into his own semi-meandering “Just What I Needed / Not What I Needed.” “I’ve always liked quoting from other people,” Toledo says. “When you write something that feels like another song that you’re thinking about, it almost seems better just to go and quote it directly. Sometimes it allows it to hit the listener in a way that it wouldn’t otherwise.” Now with a record deal, a full band, and a new album on the way, Toledo could soon find himself inspiring younger musicians. But hopefully Car Seat Headrest acolytes won’t encounter the same kind of quarter-life crisis that he did. Whatever future obstacles Toledo runs into, though, nothing compares to the end-of-college confusion and aimlessness he faced three years ago, a period he’s grateful to have grown past. “[ Teens of Denial ] wasn’t really the album that I wanted to write — it was the only album I could write [at the time],” he says. “I’m glad that it ended up being a phase rather than defining who I am forever.” Car Seat Headrest: from indie recluse to gas mask-wearing party starter? Y ou cannot accuse Car Seat Headrest, AKA Will Toledo, of taking the easy route. Four years on from the release of breakthrough record Teens of Denial, Toledo is back with new album Making a Door Less Open, only now he is going under the name Trait and is wearing a gas mask in photos. Toledo’s restless and impassioned indie rock is looking a little different, too. The new album blends his classic songwriting chops with a bold exploration of electronic textures. This is the result of essentially making the album twice: once as Car Seat Headrest, and again alongside producer Andrew Katz as their jokey EDM side project 1 Trait Danger, before landing on a middle ground. “My process is always reactive [when making a new record],” Toledo says over the phone from his home in Seattle. “I didn’t have any concrete ideas beyond something that did not sound like Teens of Denial.” Repeating the formula that made Car Seat Headrest one of the most critically acclaimed new acts in recent years “wasn’t even a possibility”. If anything, his success thus far was more reason to embark on a musical pivot. “I’m driving the car and I know where I want to go,” he says. “Now people can really see what I’m capable of.” In reality, Making a Door Less Open is not the huge leap in sound that it may first appear – guitars bristle and explode throughout the scabrous Hollywood, while Toledo’s love of Radiohead’s Kid A shows itself in the glitchy pulses of Martin and Can’t Cool Me Down. The prolific artist – this is somehow the 27-year-old Toledo’s 13th album – admits that he is “too much of a shut-in’’ to embrace club culture and argues “good party music is songs you can listen to on your own or in a group setting. The goal was to make music that could flip-flop like that.” Escaping his introverted tendencies is also at the heart of Toledo’s Trait character. It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to deduce that wearing a mask is one way to escape; Toledo is quick to cop to this. “Trait is a creature filled with exuberant energy. The character is a way to be an embodiment of that energy rather than some schmuck with a microphone.” He needn’t be so bashful. By effectively collaborating with himself, Toledo has avoided the pitfalls of repetition and complacency; a trap that he recognises makes some bands sound “conservative”, amid a lack of “tension” between old friends who have become overly comfortable. Making a Door Less Open has also shown a new path for artists, who can now collaborate with their own alter ego. In a period when getting into the studio with someone else isn’t possible, it might just be an unlikely way forward. Car Seat Headrest Drop New Remixes and Covers EPs. MADLO: Remixes features remixes of five Making a Door Less Open tracks, with contributions coming from Superorganism (“Martin”), Scuba (“Weightlifters”), Yeule (“Deadlines”), and Dntel (“Life Worth Missing”). 1 Trait Danger, a Car Seat side-project of sorts developed by frontman Will Toledo and drummer Andrew Katz, also turned in a remix of “Martin.” Meanwhile, the Influences EP finds Car Seat Headrest covering four songs that inspired Making a Door Less Open . The tracklist boasts David Bowie’s “Golden Years,” the Who’s “Substitute,” Nine Inch Nails’ “March of the Pigs,” and Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill.” Released last May, Making a Door Less Open marked Car Seat Headrest’s first album of all-new material since 2016’s Teens of Denial . In the intervening years, however, the band released a live album, 2019’s Commit Yourself Completely , while in 2018 they remade and reissued their 2011 classic, Twin Fantasy , as Twin Fantasy (Face to Face) . God, Drugs, And Copyright Infringement: Car Seat Headrest’s Comedy Of Errors. One week ago, Will Toledo had to rewrite a song to avoid breaking the law. It seems he had personally annoyed Ric Ocasek of The Cars, a brief cover of whose 1978 hit "Just What I Needed" used to bridge the gap between two tracks on Teens of Denial , the latest album from Toledo's project Car Seat Headrest, which is out online today. The sample was meant as a riff of sorts on the puzzlingly mundane name that Toledo has used for his music since 2010, when he was 17 and would record demos in the privacy of his parents' vehicle. "It was just a song I was listening to at the time,” Toledo tells me. "It was more or less a joke on my part: How far can we take it? How much of the song can we put into it?” None, actually, owing to a communication breakdown somewhere in the sample-clearance process. But Toledo didn't mind: He completed a full rewrite of the song in 48 hours, just in time for Teens of Denial 's digital release. The album's entire vinyl run had to be yanked from stores and physically destroyed, but hey, mistakes happen in rock and roll. (A repressed LP edition will arrive later this year.) This wasn't even the first legally mandated edit Toledo had to make to Teens of Denial . Another song, “Unforgiving Girl,” originally contained part of a Neil Diamond composition, which had to be written out for similar reasons. Other references made it to the final product: Toledo sings part of Dido’s “White Flag” on “The Ballad of Costa Concordia,” changing the lyrics to be even more depressing and incoherent: “There will be no more flags above my door / I have lost, and always will be." Copyright-law obstacles come up more often in hip-hop and house, where sampling is foundational to the genre, than in indie rock. But Car Seat Headrest was born online, where musical snippets flow freely from song to song, where the mash-up genre was born. He disseminated his early work through Bandcamp and Reddit, and his scratchy fever dreams are as much about listening to music as they are about making it. The rewritten version of what’s now called “Not What I Needed” bites one of Toledo’s own songs, “Something Soon,” from last year’s Teens of Style , his Matador Records debut after 11 self-released online albums. He’d planned on saving a reversed version of that song’s outro for a future album, but spliced it into "Not What I Needed" when he realized it was in the same key as the following track on Teens of Denial . "I like it better than the original version,” he says of the reworked song. "That was my least favorite song on the album already. It was the least emotionally engaging to me. It seemed kind of smug and sarcastic in a way that I didn't really want to pursue. This changed the tone of it and brought some more emotions to the surface." Toledo overlaid the reversed section of “Something Soon” with a recording of himself explaining his band name to a German radio station, to preserve the joke originally wrapped up in the Cars sample. "The same day I was preparing the demo of the new version, I had to do this interview,” he says. "It wasn't a very good interview. It was hard to understand them, and they were not asking great questions, so afterwards I recorded it and then when I went back and listened to it I immediately thought I should stick this on the demo as well. It was a very of-the-moment thing." For all the last-minute tinkering, Teens of Denial is a far more ambitious, fully realized record than the ones Toledo would put together in parking lots. It lays out his longtime fixations — depression, anxiety, drugs, alienation, God, Top 40 radio — on a grander stage than ever. He’s equally quick to reference a pop song from 15 years ago as he is the biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah: They're both part of his idiosyncratic vernacular. Toledo started mining the Bible for material a few years ago, after he was required to take religion classes as an undergraduate at Virginia's College of William and Mary. He didn’t grow up especially religious, but he was fascinated by the storytelling potential of Christianity and the ways its mythology still informs the way many people cope with everyday suffering. “Pop culture works a lot like religion,” he says. Celebrities are canonized like saints, while songs can spread like prayers. On “Drugs With Friends,” Jesus himself shows up to party-shame Toledo while he trips on psychedelics on his friend’s bedroom floor. On the record’s opening track, “Fill in the Blank,” God, the cops, and the audience all agree that Toledo should “stay the fuck down.” Police appear in his lyrics almost as often as deities, which makes sense given the power of both to surveil and kill at will. (According to the lyric sheet I received for the album, “Not What I Needed” was at one point titled "There Is a Policeman Inside All of Our Heads, He Must Be Destroyed.”) Toledo sings like a young person terrified of being watched, and also desirous of the same thing. Being watched at least means you exist. He name-searches his band on Twitter, and tells me that he reads his reviews. Keeping tabs on what your listeners think of you is easier than ever in the Internet age, and Car Seat Headrest is very much an Internet band. Toledo’s songs often sound like they could have been written in the ‘70s, ‘80s, or ‘90s, until you catch a more modern word in the lyrics: “They've got a portrait by Van Gogh / On the Wikipedia page / For clinical depression / Yeah, it helps to describe it,” he sings on “Vincent.” He’s articulating a fairly new headspace: It wasn’t always possible to type keywords into an infinite database to try to figure out why you feel so much like shit, only to be greeted by the art of a man who suffered alone and died alone 125 years back. (As of writing, Van Gogh’s "Old Man in Sorrow (On the Threshold of Eternity)" is still the lead image on Wikipedia’s entry for major depressive disorder.) There’s so much comedy in suffering if you’re able to look at it from the right angle, especially when you’ve got the echo chamber of the Internet to scream into. For Toledo, laughing at his own misery provides a kind of catharsis, and Teens of Denial is one of the funniest records about soul- crushing despair you’ll hear for a while. On the eight-minute breakup epic “Cosmic Hero,” Toledo sings with both middle fingers lifted high in the air: “I will go to heaven / You won’t go to heaven / I will go to heaven / I won’t see you there!” He gently mocks his own bad habits on “Drugs With Friends”: "Hangovers feel good when I know it’s the last one / Then I feel so good that I have another one." "I look for humor as a way of balancing emotions in my own life,” Toledo says. "The TV shows or movies that I watch, they usually do the same thing. I prefer stuff that is a blend of comedy and drama or tragedy or whatever, stuff that doesn't limit itself to one emotional tone. Wes Anderson would be a good example of that: His comedic moments are always offset by dark moments, and vice versa. That's the model I'm working off of in writing my albums." It helps that Toledo has a gilded ear for hooks and a yelp that sells the darkness in his songs as readily as it does the jokes. The album’s most tightly coiled song, “Destroyed by Hippie Powers,” broadcasts the full emotive range of his singing. He goes from delivering sullen one-liners (“It’s more than what you bargained for, but it’s a little less than what you paid for”) to cracking his voice in one of the record’s most intense and revelatory moments. “What happened to that chubby little kid / Who smiled so much and loved the Beach Boys?” Toledo asks. “What happened is I killed that fucker / And I took his name and I got new glasses." Shedding former selves in your late teens and early twenties is painful, especially when those selves are preserved in music as if in amber. Toledo has quite the fossil record of who he used to be from the last six years of using Bandcamp, but Teens of Denial feels like a break from that history. Car Seat Headrest is a full band now, a touring act, no longer an isolated project. Toledo is 23, and keenly aware of the eyes that now fall on him. He’s ready to leave his teens behind. Car Seat Headrest Teens of Denial. Car Seat Headrest, the indie rock brainchild of Will Toledo, steadily developed from a series of lo-fi tracks recorded in his car as a teenager, but a well-timed signing to Matador Records allowed the project to grow more quickly. Last fall's Teens of Style introduced a full band and proper studio to a selection of the project's best songs to catch up new fans (and get the band acquainted with being a band), and Teens of Denial gives the augmented fan base a collection of new tracks that make great use of the new equipment. Though the means may have changed, the new album bears more stylistic resemblance to Toledo's Bandcamp recordings than Teens of Style , featuring Toledo's old trademarks of songs that exceed the 10-minute mark and an overarching, self-referential narrative. Musically, Teens of Denial is a love letter to pop rock bands of the early '90s — most notably Pavement and Weezer — but with a compositional and orchestral scope more akin to Titus Andronicus, channelling the New Jersey punk band's penchant for dramatic flourishes and grandiose statements more than the slacker vibes of his heroes. Guitar rock rules the album's exceptional opening half, hitting its apex with the ingenious, duelling hooks of "Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales." The best usage of the expanded palette comes at the album's climax of "Cosmic Hero" and "The Ballad of the Costa Concordia," where horns punctuate the densely relatable lyrics. Toledo's lyrics bear similarity to those of Destroyer's Dan Bejar in that both engage deeply with the Western art canon, but Toledo is very openly a young man struggling with responsibilities, and uses the references to increase understanding, rather than alienate. Despite clocking in at a whopping 70 minutes, Car Seat Headrest pack enough hooks in to avoid lagging, thanks to Toledo's practice with his lengthy yet phenomenal earlier albums Twin Fantasy and How to Leave Town . Though Teens of Style may have been an introduction to Toledo's sound, Teens of Denial is an excellent introduction to the project's wider vision. (Matador)