Car Seat Headrest Announce Long-Awaited New Album, The Scholars

This is not a drill, y’all—Car Seat Headrest is back. It’s been five long, long years, but the wait has officially come to an end: Car Seat Headrest has finally announced the details for their fifth studio record, and it is a doozy. The Scholars, slated for a May 2 release from Matador, is not just any album; it’s a wholesale rock opera, Ziggy Stardust style. Although, if you’ve been keeping up with the band’s interactive webquest riddle game they’ve used to tease the record these past few weeks, then you already know all of this.

The Scholars is coming a full half-decade after the beloved, Will Toledo-led band released their last record, the experimental, EDM-leaning Making A Door Less Open. That shift in the group’s sound and project was somewhat controversial with listeners at the time, from fans who expected the raw vulnerability of the 2018 re-release of Twin Fantasy (Face to Face) to bleed into the band’s next project, to critics who fell in love with the precocious, furious indie rock of 2016’s critical darling Teens of Denial—and I admit, as someone whose teenage years were defined by Car Seat Headrest (seriously, I was insufferable), I definitely fell into both categories. The question on everyone’s lips: Was this a one-time experiment, a complete overhaul, or something else entirely?

Well, it seems we might be about to find out. But one thing is for certain: This is Car Seat Headrest rebirthed—and Car Seat Headrest as we’ve never seen them before. “What we’ve been doing more of in recent years is just taking the pulses of each other. 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.” (Read more on Toledo in our in-depth Car Seat Headrest feature from late 2023).

The Scholars is centered around the lives, loves and losses of a group of students (scholars, if you get my gist) attending the fictional Parnassus University, who “range from the tortured and doubt-filled young playwright Beolco to Devereaux, a person born to religious conservatives who finds themselves desperate for higher guidance.” Sprawling across nine tracks—including what might be the longest Car Seat Headrest song to date, the 19-minute-long “Planet Desperation” (we are so freaking back, guys)—and taking inspiration from Shakespeare, Mozart, classical opera and, of course, Biblical/spiritual/religious texts, the record tells the tale of a college torn apart by the age-old battle between tradition and progress, history and present. There’s also supernatural resurrection, hidden underground passages, magical powers and a potential cult of ancient beings who secretly control the entire school—and that’s just in the first single.

The 11-minute epic “Gethsemane” (and its accompanying music video, directed by Andrew Wonder) was released alongside the album announcement, and it seems like the band is attempting to combine the technical improvements and varied sounds of Making A Door Less Open with the intricately-woven storytelling and multi-part trajectories of old fan favorites like “The Ballad of Costa Concordia” and “The Ending of Dramamine.” It’s undoubtedly rooted in questions of spirituality and the bloody wounds of yearning, although it might take most of us a couple of listens to begin to parse everything that’s going on. Additionally, the music video is wonderfully bizarre, featuring a main character—possibly Rosa, the song’s protagonist, although possibly not—that I can only really describe as a manic possessed nightmare girl (you’ll see what I mean about a quarter of the way into the video).

To help you out a bit, here’s how the band themselves described the story of “Gethsemane”: “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. 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.”

Watch the music video for “Gethsemane” and check out The Scholars tracklist and artwork below.

The Scholars Artwork:

The Scholars Tracklist:
CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You)
Devereaux
Lady Gay Approximately
The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man)
Equals
Gethsemane
Reality
Planet Desperation
True/False Lover