Fox Theater

Car Seat Headrest’s bold new rock opera The Scholars isn’t just a new chapter for the premiere standard bearers of young internet rockers. It’s a spiritual rebirth, and one that didn’t come easily.

In May of 2020, Car Seat Headrest (frontman Will Toledo, lead guitarist Ethan Ives, drummer Andrew Katz, and bassist Seth Dalby) released their experimental, beat-heavy album Making a Door Less Open, right as the world shut down. This led to a long period of enforced inactivity.

When they were finally able to tour in 2022 they were delighted, if surprised, that their audience was now younger than ever, thanks to the surprise viral success of their songs “It’s Only Sex” and “Sober to Death” and a new generation discovering their coming-of-age classics Teens of Denial and Twin Fantasy. The production-heavy Masquerade tour brought forth no shortage of challenges, as the band pushed the limits of their abilities. “It felt like a very technically challenging set because we had spent so many years doing this loud, fast, dirty rock music,” says Katz. “And now we’re doing this more precise, large production type of set. Eventually, it came together, and then we all got sick.”

Both Katz and Toledo came down with COVID-19, and Car Seat Headrest had to cancel their remaining dates and recuperate. Katz was bedridden for two weeks and even lost his sense of smell, while Toledo had a much longer period of illness and discovered that he had a histamine imbalance and had to make major dietary changes. “There’s a part of me who’s still a kid who likes a sick day from school. You get to lay around and contemplate the details of life.” He began looking into meditation practices, starting with various apps and then into Chan meditation and strains of Buddhism. That eventually led to a “dedication to following spiritual practices,” he notes, which informed the album.

He was raised Presbyterian and now declines to put a label on himself or keep to any strict definitions of faith. “I think that one of the big blessings I’ve been given is that I never saw the institution of church as being the place that holds God,” he says. “When you look at the history of the Christian Church, it is always constantly breaking open and shattering and giving rise to new forms. Whether you call it spirituality or not, I can’t help but see that in society nowadays with queer culture, with the furry culture, with the bonding together of youth for something that is more than what we knew and what we grew up with.”

Inspired by an apocryphal poem by “Archbishop Guillermo Guadalupe del Toledo,” and featuring character designs from Toledo’s friend, the cartoonist Cate Wurtz, the first half of the album focuses on the deep yearning and spiritual crisis of the titular Scholars. They 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. The second part features a series of epics detailing the clash between the defenders of the classic texts “and the young person who doesn’t care about the canon, who is going to tear all of that up, basically,” Toledo says. “And so within this one campus, there becomes a war.”

From Shakespeare to Mozart to classical opera, Toledo pulled from the classics when devising the lyrics and story arc of The Scholars, while the music draws, carefully, from classic rock story song cycles such as The Who’s Tommy and David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. “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 notes. “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.”

Self-produced by 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 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.”

They’ve never sound more fully realized or assured of themselves, which fans will notice on the lead single “Gethsemane,” one of the most epic songs in a catalog that doesn’t lack for epics, a narrative and sonic journey that conveys the spiritual yearning at the heart of the album. But while The Scholars has some of the most expansive Car Seat Headrest songs to date, including the nearly 19-minute long “Planet Desperation,” and opener “CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You”), they know how to make each part of the journey compelling, filling the runtimes with unexpected turns and enervating hooks. And moments like the jaunty “The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That Man)” show they haven’t lost their ability to write a short-and-sweet jaunty single that chimes like classic ‘60s folk pop, updated for the present.

Having gone through their trials, Car Seat Headrest are now ready for the next chapter in their career. It will astonish both longtime supporters and new fans. While Car Seat Headrest started as Toledo’s solo project, it is now fully a band. “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.” It is a journey that listeners will want to embark on again and again as they absorb and discover the rich depths and clanging resonances of The Scholars.