If you’re familiar with the name Will Toledo, you might remember when he was a solo musician working under the name Car Seat Headrest, releasing tunes partly-tracked in the family automobile on Bandcamp. Flash-forward to fall 2025: CSH has long been bona-fide success story: a full band with five studio LPs and two live albums on the venerable Matador Records label, including a re-recording (and slight reimagining) of their beloved 2011 masterwork, Twin Fantasy; and license to explore wherever their creative impulses take them. Released in May, The Scholars is the band’s latest record, a sprawling 70-minute rock opera. It’s their most intricate album yet both in terms of meta-lore and composition, possessing a full backstory and notably featuring more input from the other band members than any effort prior. It also further grows one of the best aspects of Car Seat Headrest’s full-band, which is the formidable vocal duo of Toledo and guitarist Ethan Ives, who provides a weighty foil to Toledo’s generally-higher register, especially useful in an album with many characters.
Against the flow of somewhat-inebriated and mostly-disappointed Red Sox fans pouring out of the Fenway Park area comes a counter-current of younger folks accessorizing not only with lots of KN95 masks, but also a considerable volume of cat ears, fox tails, and the like. Car Seat Headrest have become quite a health-conscious band in recent years – the main Covid era was hard on Toledo’s health, resulting in a myriad of cancelled shows and tours, even looking back to the headline slot that could have been at the Frantic City festival in NJ in 2022. Toledo performs in his own white cone mask, and before playing asks that people use their phone flashlights to call out in case anyone needs help, a protocol which sees use once or twice throughout the night. It may be fall, but things like dehydration are still a concern, even in spite of a truly lengthy PSA played before the show, where drummer Andrew Katz has a bounty of reminders to stay hydrated as well as facts about water – and some special guests like “Dave Matthews” and even “John Lennon”, all voiced by Katz in his completely normal speaking tone.
Packed in tightly, the crowd has made it upstream to the MGM Music Hall nestled into a corner of Fenway, and they’re in for a night that is firmly focused on The Scholars, making their way through nearly everything on the record in sequence, save for its tracklist’s midsection, ‘Equals’. The Scholars is something of a choose-your-own-adventure deal – there’s a “libretto” enclosed with copies of the album detailing the broad strokes about the characters and plot, but as a good rock opera does, its music is powerful enough to conjure emotion all on its own, even if one doesn’t opt for delving deeply into the supplemental material. The first four-pack of songs on the album is also the first presented to the audience: the light percussion from Katz and those first exploratory piano chords from Ben Roth nail the sensation of something coming to life in ‘CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You)’. The narrator wakes from a dream and the song takes form, hard-charging guitars and piano hits that sound shining and golden in their clarity.
The first three songs deal, broadly-speaking, with characters feeling the weight of their predecessors in various guises. The hugeness of ‘CCF’ is tamed a bit in the more patient, heavy guitars of ‘Devereaux’, then things turn acoustic during ‘Lady Gay Approximately’. ‘The Catastrophe’ amps things up again true to its name, and it’s all seeded with references to other works of music, which is hardly unfamiliar territory for Toledo, but also adds color to the universe of The Scholars. The band takes a pause, however, for something sourced from elsewhere – a new song called ‘The Colossus’ which is currently only available via the band’s Patreon page. Ives takes a more prominent vocal role on this one, a trend that continues later in the night when they resume digging into The Scholars once again.
The stage goes dark briefly and a spotlight reilluminates it, only shining down on Toledo in the center. He sings a portion of ‘900 Miles’, a traditional American song from the railroad era, the strumming of the guitar resembling the steady chug of a locomotive’s many wheels. It calls back to the intro of ‘CCF’, which found Toledo interpolating a piece of a French carol into that introductory wind-up. The lights return in beet red as the rail song melts into ‘Gethsemane’, one of the lengthy tracks that heralds the start of Act 2 of The Scholars, which as prescribed by the libretto is entitled, The Ransom. It also calls back to ‘CCF’ structurally: a build, an early-to-midsection defined by Ives’ titanic guitars, channeling such prog touchstones as Tommy by The Who. Fans of the Bible and/or The X-Files will know that Gethsemane is the garden where, post-Last Supper, Jesus faces a crisis of faith prior to his betrayal and crucifixion. In the next movement things are quieter, the backdrop of the stage lit in white with banners bearing cave painting-like figures on them. And it all builds to the final sentiment of “You can love again, if you try again!”, said over and over, seemingly the core belief of the album. It’s as anthemic and moving whether you have all the context or none, a declaration constructed from, and earned by, everything that has preceded it.
The narrative seems to veer sharply from here, as evidenced by the next song, ‘Reality’ finding Ives voicing a character whose role had previously been occupied by Toledo, and the fourth wall dissolving in general. Similar to Toledo’s vocal gymnastics in ‘The Catastrophe’, Ives’ singing ranges from falsetto down to pendulous lows that recall Scott Walker. Here the most prominent reference is to one of Car Seat Headrest’s own songs, ‘Beach Life-in-Death’ (BLID), and the libretto states that the ostensible leader of the singing troupe in the narrative has suffered an “early death”, also a line found in that song. Seeing a thematically-appropriate time for reflection on their earlier work, the band decides to punctuate the proceedings with one bona-fide hit from their major label debut, Teens of Denial. While it doesn’t feel like ToD came out yesterday, its encroachment on a decade in age is a surefire way to feel old. The crowd revels in their first opportunity to dance and crowd-surf to a song they’ve known for ages, and the house lights shine out across the room during the chorus. But what’s telling about The Scholars is how vital this live show feels even without the presence, at least not in full, of the vast majority of CSH’s previous material. Across its nearly twenty minutes, ‘Planet Desperation’ closes the main portion of the night, bringing everything to a head and circling back around in its final moments to its fundamental principle: you can love again, if you try again.
Breaking briefly after that Herculean effort – several of them, in fact – the band return and Toledo muses on how the making of new music necessitates retiring some of the old material. As a sort of catch-all, they’ve melded a bunch of older songs into one big medley, which Toledo starts by singing, in full live clarity as opposed to its lo-fi origins, “You can never tell the truth / but you can tell something that sounds like it.” Even back on 2011’s My Back Is Killing Me Baby, he was already profoundly good at formulating these meaningful declarations about existence. ‘Something Soon’ sounds like it was born to be played to this many people, Toledo having already begun developing his favored style of chaotic, noisy guitars. The second album to receive the medley treatment is, of course, Twin Fantasy, with a segment of BLID giving way to the album’s (sort of) title track. When it slows down to just Katz’s drums and Seth Dalby’s bass, one can sense that the audience is full of people listening intently to which lyrical iteration Toledo will pull from in the next verse – to be expected from a band that has always inspired a loving form of scrutiny, and promoted The Scholars with a bespoke ARG. And that album has one more offering to close the night, the brief ‘True/False Lover’. It’s the cap on a piece of work that began with a testimonial that most lessons from the past amount to “That shit will hurt you,” but leaves the audience with visions of a future defined by a love as expansive as the sky.
The Scholars is an invitation to experience Car Seat Headrest at their most unbridled; no longer the product of an auteur, but instead a whole unit of people who’ve matured emotionally and as musicians in the past ten-plus years. The maximalism of this latest record will resonate with some and come to rank among some fans’ favorite CSH albums – and surely for others who more longed-for the lower-fi experiments of years past, it won’t. But as I always say on the rare occasion it comes up to assemble a rock opera in a year beginning with 2-0, to do so successfully is a nearly-unequaled combination of self-confidence, skill, audacity, and passion, and it makes as compelling a case on a record as it does unfolding before your eyes.
Photos and words by Collin Heroux