Car Seat Headrest are returning to school

I’m almost late meeting with Car Seat Headrest; stuck in their new web game’s detention repeatedly typing ‘I must not disobey Mr. Katz' over and over again. Sweating and terrified, I’m soon to come face to face with the formidable Mr. Katz himself – drummer Andrew.

He laughs apologetically over the Zoom call, wagging his finger as he says detention isn’t easy to get out of. There’s 6 other lessons that make up the ‘WebQuest’: a digital painting to create for Art, an equation involving a goat for Mathematics, and various other tricksy riddles.

This e-adventure sprung from “Gethsemane” – the band’s behemoth first single from the group’s upcoming release The Scholars. “We sent the album to Matador and [label founder] Chris Lombardi got interested in different ways we could put it out,” vocalist and rhythm guitarist Will Toledo explains. “It’s got these different sections and he wanted to release it section by section. What came to mind for me was a scavenger hunt – releasing something online and people having to solve a clue or go somewhere. Each time they solve the riddle, they get a piece of the song.”

Toledo took the helm as chief riddle writer, and worked alongside small programming company ‘Router’ to create the site’s nostalgic early-web design. Notably, the puzzles arehard. “We planned on people solving it as a community though,” Toledo nods. “We made a discord channel for our Patreon subscribers where they could chat together. That, plus Reddit, was where people were banding together to solve things a lot faster.”

One of the riddles involves actually going to Wisconsin, and their fans found their way around that too. “It was weird,” Toledo laughs. “There’s a Reddit for everything now, so someone posted it in r/wisconsin and asked for help figuring it out. And someone did – they didn’t post anything about how they got it, they just knew the answer somehow.”

For a band and fanbase so chronically online, The Scholars is unusually luddite. It harks back to ye olde medieval times, spinning tales of a great university and nearby clown college. There’s a cohort of distinct characters each taking their turn to sing: Rosa, a medical student who can bring the dead back to life; Beolco, who believes he’s reincarnated from the playwright founder of the university; and Malory, who discovers he likes dressing up like a bird to name but a few. The eponymous scholars battle against conservative parents, religious dogma, and their own minds before having a more literal showdown with the rival clowns.

Each character has been rendered by cartoonist Cate Wurtz, animation giving them life in music video form. Toledo says he thinks about Rosa, singer of “Gethsemane”, the most. “I’m not sure why, I just really like the design that Cate gave her, but I can find ways to relate to all of them for sure. Since I was involved in writing the songs, I was putting elements of myself into them.”

“The chanticleer is my favourite,” drummer Katz jumps in. “Just because I got to sing that part,” he laughs. This mysterious figure appears in several songs; and by the album’s climax, everyone thinks he’s dead but he’s actually just hanging out in the library. “I like the idea of the clown college in general,” bassist Seth Dalby adds. “That just outside there’s a separate world away from the real scholars.”

Wondering if the band could enroll in the clown college themselves, Dalby grins, “I used to be able to juggle a bit,” while Ethan Ives valiantly attempts to juggle the first three items he spots before him, dropping everything immediately. “We’re full of clown tricks, man! Name anything, we can do it,” Katz laughs. “You should see Will on a trapeze, this guy is limber.” You could believe him; Toledo is well-versed in having everybody fooled.

New recordThe Scholars is introduced by Toledo as “translated and adapted from an unfinished and unpublished poem written by my great-great-grandfather, the Archbishop Guillermo Guadalupe del Toledo.” Unfortunately he’s a fabricated grandparent, a case of Toledo characteristically committing to the bit. “It’s a bit of world building,” he smiles. “I assumed people would think it was fictional, but a lot of people are assuming the opposite.” The band laughs when he admits that he slightly regrets it – “I thought it was real,” Katz beams. “It checks out! It’s not completely out of the realm of possibility, that’s what makes it so cool.”

Toledo does however offhandedly mention that he might be related to the “guy who founded Yale,” and Dalby recalls a relation in a marching band somewhere down his family tree. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before they composed a campus concept album, with The Scholars also faintly echoing the pair’s shared college experience. “Our college was right next to this reenactment of early America,” Dalby explains. “It was exclusively students or people visiting to see that.” “In my senior year I was living 10 minutes away from campus,” Toledo recalls. “I would bike through the portion of town where there’s all these colonial reenactments and dirt roads and small cobblestone buildings – I’d just be in semi-formal dress on a bike going through these dirt roads.”

“My college experience ended up in [The Scholars] a lot,” Toledo continues. “That enjoyment of the mixture of past and present, having all these old buildings but then learning with a bunch of young people – it feels like you’re part of something larger, but at the same time you’re young and alive.” In this way The Scholars slots neatly into pop culture’s growing neo-medieval revival; it carries the torch from Chappell Roan’s VMA performance as Joan of Arc, chainmail jewellery tutorials on Instagram, and Pinterest predicting ‘castlecore’ to be 2025’s top trend. But for Katz, this aesthetic isn’t new: “I mean as far as I’m concerned, it’s been around since I saw Lord of the Rings when I was a kid. I’ve been into medieval shit for a long time!” he beams. “I think European medieval stuff has clicked with a lot of people in the west: we’re just continuing that.” It isn’t new for Ives either, who separately brings up The Hobbit and gives the UK a shout out for looking particularly shire-esque when they’ve visited on festival tours.

The quartet agree that this project has been their favourite yet; not only working to this mythological concept but approaching production in a more dynamic way. “I feed off detail and the paratext,” Ives shares. “The things that aren’t music related like, ‘oh this character wears these kinds of shoes.’ The littlest details I can get in my head, the more exhilarated I am.” With a laugh, Katz adds: “I think I had to do a lot less thinking than other people, but it was a very enjoyable process for sure – especially the way we recorded it. Back in the day it was a one take thing, and you’d always end up having to redo the whole fucking thing. But this time if I didn’t like my fill, I got to punch in and get a better one.”

The band are used to throwing everything at the wall, but this time they could peel some bits off and stick them back in a different place. The pay off is immense, each track its own epic: a tangle of voices rising and falling alongside spectacular ideas and sprawling instrumentals.

Toledo talks about each song as its own living thing, especially the near-19-minute-long “Planet Desperation”: “We’ll spend a lot of time working on bits and pieces, and sometimes there’s a bit that needs a larger space to breathe. Giving ourselves permission to be long was the right choice for these songs. At the end of the day, it’s just about doing what’s right for the music.” The Scholars is above all accessible, an enjoyable listen regardless of whether you’ve gotten so deep into the lore that you posted on r/wisconsin, or if you’re only listening to one song.

Before the chat ends, Toledo opens up about what else is going on in the Car Seat Headrest universe – namely what everyone’s reading. He and Dalby are tacklingInvisible Women for a book club they’ve started; Ives is starting a book on Egyptian mythology he picked up on holiday in France; and Katz is reading The Void, a book about early physics. “A lot of it is going over my head,” he laughs, “[but] I’ll just keep reading this math over and over again and eventually it’ll just click.” And once it does, maybe it will inform their next concept album. Car Seat Headrest, taking their a shot at unravelling the great questions of the universe.