Car Seat Headrest Is Cooking Up an Emo Rock Opera

Car Seat Headrest Is Cooking Up an Emo Rock Opera

Article by Adlan Jackson on Hell Gate NYC
12:48 PM EDT on February 14, 2025

Original article is here: https://hellgatenyc.com/car-seat-headrest-is-cooking-up-an-emo-rock-opera/

Text transcript of article is below.

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At the historic bar and music venue The Bitter End on Wednesday afternoon, a group of music journalists and record label workers gathered to hear the band Car Seat Headrest play through a mostly-acoustic set of the entirety of a new, unannounced album. Gerard Cosloy, the co-owner of Matador Records, called for a moment of silence for the "poor, poor motherfuckers" waiting on line for Paul McCartney tickets on the other side of town. The Bitter End, the bar's slogan goes, "is where it's at."

There were pamphlets on the bar tables, emblazoned with the lyrics of the album's songs, and the album's title, which is embargoed until early March, along with its release date. What I can say is that it's a concept album about an ensemble cast of young people at a college. The pamphlet showed character names from ancient mythology. Hmm. That's a tough sell. Car Seat Headrest has always been a band with a subtle and successful literary sensibility. Was an emo rock opera taking things a bit too far?

But then the four-piece band took the stage, and I can say that for most of the album, it's still them—thank God. And if you so choose, you can as easily tune out the parts of the record that's high concept cringe, and tune back in for the lyrics about scrolling through your phone trying to find someone who still wants to hear from you, or walking into the ocean at Long Beach. They have deep lyrics, but also deep hooks. Lead singer Will Toledo, wearing a gingham shirt, a knit sweater and an N-95, sounded like he always had, like a pop punk Billy Idol. The material is as catchy as you might expect from someone who's been writing as long as he has.

During the third song, the battery for the pickup in Toledo's acoustic guitar crapped out for the second time that day ("We're really going through 'em"). He called an audible, and rocked out with the microphone in his hands.

That was the song where I noticed the two furries in the back of the bar. Their giant cartoon heads were bopping to the tempo, which had hiked up to a ska beat. They were the only ones who obliged drummer Andrew Katz's imploration to get up and dance—maybe they felt the most free.

The next song was about cancel culture, and the lyrics were more directly about guilt and forgiveness, things we all know about. These were fundamentally pop songs about self-loathing and angst, only filtered alternately through shrieks and a dusty western sound.

Guitarist Ethan Ives spent most of the set shredding on a Telecaster plugged right into his amp (he even had to borrow Toledo's tuner). Near the album's end, he sang co-lead on a song with Toledo, who dedicated the song to "prophets" like Brian Wilson, who "lived in the darkness." Ives said the song was about generational divide, between a hippie generation that got lost on a voyage to the center of themselves and a generation that came after, who, "if they moved around too much, they walked into traffic," and if they stood still, they were a loiterer, and to whom the hippie generation left nothing but an obsolete way of life.

I was wondering how Toledo's mom, who I heard laugh, felt about that, and whether the hippies, on the whole, had much say in the ruin they left behind, and if the younger generation might end up feeling just as powerless when they got old.

Whoever was right, it seemed like everybody liked the song.