Car Seat Headrest's first album in five years is an honest-to-goodness rock opera
The band cites Shakespeare, Mozart, The Who's Tommy, and David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust as inspirations for The Scholars.
Photo: Carlos Cruz/Car Seat Headrest
It’s time to come out of hibernation, concept album-heads. We haven’t heard from Car Seat Headrest in a while, but the indie rockers aren’t tiptoeing around their return. Today, the band announced The Scholars, their first album in five years. But this isn’t any old LP; the band—frontman Will Toledo, lead guitarist Ethan Ives, drummer Andrew Katz, and bassist Seth Dalby—is touting Scholars as an honest-to-goodness rock opera, complete with original characters, a reincarnation storyline, and vague themes of yearning, youth, and religious anxiety. It even has its own logline:
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.
The band entered a period of prolonged inactivity after both Katz and Toledo were knocked out by COVID-19 infections in 2022. Toledo’s illness inspired a newfound “dedication to following spiritual practices,” however, which informed some of the album’s themes. Other cited inspirations include Mozart, Shakespeare, classic opera, The Who’s Tommy, and Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust. “One thing that can be a struggle with rock operas is that the individual songs kind of get sacrificed for the flow of the plot,” Toledo said in a statement. “I didn’t want to sacrifice that to make a very fluid narrative. And so this is sort of a middle ground where each song can be a character and it’s like each one is coming out on center stage and they have their song and dance.”
You can meet some of those characters in “Gethsemane,” the album’s first single, which the band released along with an accompanying 13-minute, black-and-white video today. You can check that out, as well as the album’s tracklist, album art, and Car Seat Headrest’s upcoming tour dates, below. The Scholars releases May 2.
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
