Car Seat Headrest announce first album in five years, The Scholars

Set at the fictional college campus Parnassus University, the songs on The Scholars are populated with students and staff whose travails illuminate a loose narrative of life, death, and rebirth.

“Rosa studies at the medical school of Parnassus University. After an experience bringing a medically deceased patient back to life, she begins to regain powers suppressed since childhood, of healing others by absorbing their pain,” the band elaborates on the character piece that accompanies the new single. “Each night, instead of dreams, she encounters the raw pain and stories of the souls she touches throughout the day. Reality blurs, and she finds herself taken deep into secret facilities buried beneath the medical school, where ancient beings that covertly reign over the college bring forth their dark plans.”

Self-produced by frontman Will Toledo and recorded, for a change, mostly in analog, The Scholars is “definitely the most bottom up of any project that we've done,” says lead guitarist Ethan Ives, who was urged by Toledo to take ownership of the guitar work and sound design for the album. “I've started nerding out a lot more in the last couple of years about designing sounds more deliberately, rather than just using your lucky gear and hoping for the best. It was really rewarding, being able to sculpt things a lot more specifically, and being able to layer things in more of a dense way and have more of an active design role in how things come across more than any previous album.”

While Car Seat Headrest started as Toledo's solo project, it is now fully a band. “We’ve really been leaning into that sort of cocoon that started off with the pandemic years and just turned into this special space that we were creating all on our own,” says Toledo. “I was coming out of it as a solo project and it always just felt like it was in pieces. There's the album we're working on, and then there's a live show that we're doing, and then there's everything in between. And it didn't really feel to me like things got in sync in an inner feeling way until this record, with that internal communal energy. And it's become that band feeling for me in a much more realized way. That's been a big journey.”

Tracklist:

1. CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You)
2. Devereaux
3. Lady Gay Approximately
4. The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man)
5. Equals
6. Gethsemane
7. Reality
8. Planet Desperation
9. True/False Lover