Interview: Car Seat Headrest

As guitars return to the forefront of rock in the form of clean, bite-sized sketches for the age of playlists, it may come as no surprise that indie’s internet darlings Car Seat Headrest have opted out of this cultural chapter and written a high-concept rock opera. Once the vehicle-inspired vehicle for Virginia native Will Toledo’s D.I.Y. quaint-rock output, the now on-the-record four-piece has returned with their first studio LP in five years. Grain Magazine spoke with lead guitarist Ethan Ives to get some insight into how this record ushers in a new era for Car Seat Headrest.

The Scholars invites us to Parnussus University, introducing us to the titular scholars that populate its nine-track listing. The album centers on the deep yearning and spiritual crises of its characters—“a series of epics detailing the clash between the defenders of the classic texts.” Billed as the band’s entry alongside the likes of Tommy by The Who and Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, there’s no doubt this is one of Car Seat Headrest’s most lore-filled projects yet. 

Longtime listeners will recognize many of the moves from the CSH playbook, but this time, the teen angst of their coming-of-age classics is replaced by lofty story arcs inspired by Mozart, apocryphal poetry, and opera. As Ives breaks this down, we begin to piece together how The Scholars found itself at the feet of Car Seat Headrest’s rock rebirth.

“It's sort of a rock opera kind of structure, and that was something that Will, our vocalist, brought to the group. When we actually started writing in earnest, in about Spring 2023, Will came to the group with some demos that he'd been working on and some beginnings of songs. That was kind of the kernel that he brought to the table, like, ‘I want there to be a selection of characters, and there'll be this narrative cycle that goes between them’ and, you know, from there, nothing's off limits”.

As hinted at earlier, Car Seat Headrest has officially evolved from a solo project to a band, with drummer Andrew Katz and bassist Seth Dalby rounding out the act. This dynamic shift paved the way for earlier collaboration on the record, with many ideas stemming from jams and live-room experimentation. This album even marks the first time the band has vocalists other than Toledo leading songs, with slow-burner “Reality” featuring Ives as the narrator.

“Will was still coming to us with material that he had been working on. But it was much, much earlier in the process. Things were a lot less decided, there were a lot more gaps to fill, and so there was just more opportunity for and more openness.

“It was definitely a wildly more collaborative album than any previous one. It had been kind of creeping in that direction already, but the previous albums had still pretty much all started from more or less finished songs that Will would bring to the band.

“Some of the material that I brought to the record was stuff that I had kind of already had kicking around before the concept had taken shape. So, some of it was even me taking stuff that I'd already had and kind of hammering it into a shape that maybe conforms to the purpose of the album a little better.”

Few things are certain with a Car Seat Headrest record, but you can always expect at least one track to take listeners on a sonic journey and rack up a considerable runtime. Singles like Gethsemane and CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You) fill the void left by fan favourites like Beach Life-In-Death and Vincent, but the penultimate track, Planet Desperation, takes the podium at a discography-record-breaking 18 minutes and 51 seconds.

For those who embrace the album as a whole and spend the time with it, the runtime feels irrelevant as you follow the tracks laid by the band’s natural rhythm with familiar refrains coming and going. But with songs reaching new high-watermarks, it does beg the question - how does the band decide when a song has been cooked to perfection?

“We were getting to the point in the album where things were mostly in place, and we were like, ‘We don't have time to finish all these songs’. Let's just try to stitch as many of them together, you know, in as cohesive a way as possible. How many places can we go before it starts to feel like the wheels are falling off completely? You never really know where that point is. Sometimes you have to go way too far to know that you've gone too far. It literally is not until people hear it that you really get a sense of like, ‘oh, that was the right call’ or ‘oh, that was too much’.

“I mean, parts of “Planet Desperation” definitely fit that bill where it was actually me writing. I mean, the final form of the song is where I worried the most about theme and character. But the origins of it actually had nothing to do with that and predated the album.

“Will said for “Gethsemane”, that it was a case of being really long because he had some later parts closer to the ending. And he knew ‘okay, I know I wanted to get here, but in order for it to have the proper gravitas that it needs to, I need to backfill all the stuff that gets me to this point’.”

While The Scholars returns to the loud, fast, dirty sound that Car Seat Headrest broke through with in the mid-2010s, others may wonder what prompted the shift away from 2020’s experimental, beat-heavy Making a Door Less Open, released just as the world shut down. “I think there was kind of an understanding that MADLO was very much an experiment,” Ives says of the detour. One element that persisted, however, was its broad instrumentation—something reflected in the few live opportunities the band had to bring the record to life.

“I’d gotten the impression that it's always sort of been one of Will's ambitions to work with a really big ensemble both in and out of the studio. I think that's always been something he's kind of been trying to build towards. And definitely from there, it's been a gradual process of building a comfort level with bigger and bigger productions, working with more people, working with more varied instrumentation."

The band’s legacy will always be intertwined with the online subcultural communities and digital crate-digging of the Bandcamp boom. Car Seat Headrest’s discography is full of re-recordings, unreleased albums, remixes, covers, and alternate demos. Boasting 19 unheard demos, jams, and outtakes, The Scholars (Deluxe Edition) becomes a kind of refuge for the cuttings that didn’t make the final album.

“Normally we just sit on that stuff, but especially because people were kicking in a lot more material this time around, I was really stoked that that stuff found its way onto the special edition. There was some weird stuff that I was like, like a 50s doo-wop/greaser song that I was working on that kind of almost made it. It’s like a mini museum, I'm glad that it exists somewhere. 

Despite many of the earlier entries in their discography now having gained a cult-like appreciation, 2025 marks the ten year anniversary of their indie-breakout Teens of Style, the first CSH release via Matador Records and the first of some much anticipated shows. Looking back at the decade, Ives reminisces on how the project and its members have evolved.

“It just occurred to me recently that it has been a decade now, and my entire 20s are Car Seat. I mean, I've just been doing that - it’s the only real job I've ever had. When I first joined the band (starting as the bassist), I was in community college. I was just a kid, I wasn't even old enough to drink yet. One of our first shows in Seattle was at The Crocodile, and I had to get hastily escorted off the premises as soon as we left the stage. I was allowed to be on stage, but I was not allowed to be anywhere else in the venue because it was a bar, so I had to just go and get a milkshake or whatever.

“Going from being a kid at college to touring full time for several years on end, it changes you as a person. You learn a lot of things, you go through a lot of things, you figure a lot of stuff out really quickly that you didn't know - it's been great. It’s been really surreal seeing that milestone go by. I feel like an old man now.

While the personnel of Car Seat Headrest age with their releases, it can’t be said for their audience. Following the inevitable discovery via TikTok, the band saw the same bump that acts like Pavement and TV Girl experienced, with young fans filling theatres and queuing around the block at the limited shows the band played throughout the pandemic. For Ives, the new ears mean that there’s less pressure on appeasing the ‘heads’.

“I think the thing I've now learned to expect, is not to trust my expectations. At The Masquerade tour in 2022, the crowd completely shifted, very abruptly. Partly it was the TikTok thing, because a couple of our songs, I think, just like, I mean, nobody knows how this stuff works, but randomly it just got sucked into the system. 

“It was a whole roller coaster. It was really gratifying that we're not just calcifying into this legacy band of only having, like, ‘old heads’. It's cool that, like, there are new fans, and it's a cross generational thing, but also it was a little scary, because it just added this whole wild card element that was very new to us. 

“We have a joke within the band that it was a nice change of pace for me, because we have a long running joke in the band that I'm like the ‘Dad beacon’.  All the dads at every show would always come and talk to me, because I'm the big dinosaur Junior fan in the band and I used to make my own Fugazi tees. All the Gen X Dads would claw onto me.

Alongside the young uptick in fans at the live shows, Car Seat Headrest has become a point of interest amongst online indie forums, debates and memes across social media. A notable moment in their online history involved a Twitter interaction sparking the band exchanging covers with fellow cult-heros Smash Mouth. This is your invitation to hear CSH’s “Fallen Horses”, and maybe more importantly - Smash Mouth’s “Something Soon”.

“It still doesn't feel real to me. I remember when it happened, it was so surreal that I actually forgot about it, too surreal to imprint on my memory. I'll lose track of it and then remember it and be surprised all over again. But it was just weird becauseI remember hearing “All Star” in first grade, so many times. That song was like everywhere in my childhood, and the idea that the guys who made that song know who my band is. I’m not on Twitter anymore, but  when I was on Twitter, I remember getting the notification that Smash Mouth was following me, and my jaw just dropped to the floor.

Peering back at the decorated journey that Car Seat Headrest have forged so far, no doubt you’re also wondering when your next chance to see the band live may be. Health struggles that have plagued Toledo since getting Covid in mid-pandemic have unfortunately meant that tours are spaced out and restricted to the U.S., at least for now. However, this land-locking doesn’t stop Car Seat Headrest from reminiscing on their 2018 Twin Fantasy tour or 2016 Laneway appearances.

“We still talk fondly about those tours because the weather was so nice. The way that it was plotted meant we had a lot of leisure time, which we don't usually have, maybe it was because it was our first time. Obviously the shows were cool, everybody was really nice, and the crowds were really good. It was just a very idyllic festival experience. But we all talk about that still like ‘Remember when we did Laneway? That was so great!’ Like, I wish we could do that again soon. 

The Scholars is out now via Matador Records.