After Making a Door Less Open, it felt like the sprawling story of Car Seat Headrest might’ve ended – not with a bang nor even a whimper, but with an indifferent and unconfident shrug. The album, released into the liminal pandemic haze of 2020, never found its footing: part performance art, part identity crisis, part unfinished thesis on what it means to wear a mask when no one’s looking, it lacked the sharpness wrought in the crucible of touring. Additionally, Will Toledo’s health struggles didn’t just pause the band – they drained it of momentum. For a while, the door seemed sealed shut.
But five years later, with health matters now somewhat at bay, The Scholars doesn’t just creak that door open, it tears it off the hinges and invites you inside a world that’s been rebuilt from the weird, scattered bones of the last one. It’s not a comeback. It’s something stranger: a reassembly. A wiry, lore-streaked rock opera that unfolds – though not completely – within a liberal arts purgatory called Parnassus University. Here, Car Seat Headrest sketch something less of our reality and more of something that careens bitingly toward the mythic.
Through the vessels of many misfit characters, Toledo – and now company – wrestle with the kind of existential crises and soul-searching that used to live quietly in the corners of Car Seat Headrest’s lo-fi anthems back when it was just Toledo in a bedroom, voice cracked and fingers gliding across his guitar with nervousness. Now those crises are loud, massive, messy. The Scholars is built on that scale. It lunges toward something close to greatness – not with ego, but with an unhinged, almost holy ambition most bands today wouldn’t dare touch. It’s sprawling. Disjointed. Very alive.
And it doesn’t ask to be understood so much as it begs to be sat with. You either surrender to the sprawl, or you’re lost by track six, which might be the intended fork in the road for listeners anyway.
This is Car Seat Headrest at their most tedious, most overgrown, yet deeply committed to building a mythos, even if they don’t seem entirely in control of it. And somehow, that works in their favor. Some albums want to be solved – The Scholars is not one of them. It’s more like the homework assignment you never finish because it mutates every time you try to pin it down. Whenever you think you’ve got a hold of a thread, The Scholars twists and characters blur – metaphors? mouthpieces? ghosts? – and vanish. Rosa. Ace. Chanticleer. Artemis — they show up, drop cryptic truths, and disappear before vanishing into some new narrative arc that immediately muddies the one that precedes it while making the one after tantalizing, if not legible.
Some refrains circle back across songs like haunted mantras that do stick. “You can love again if you try again” becomes one of them. It’s hopeful, ironic, yet sincere – it’s all of those at once, or just one at a time depending on when you catch it and where your head is when it lands.
Beyond the loose biblical scaffolding that belies the record, there’s a deeper spiritual unrest in the conflicts that bind both the quirky avatars and the fractured hearts that birthed them. Songs bend in strange directions, doubling back on themselves, and somewhere in that detour is a return to musical roots, yes, but also to the idea that even chaos can be sacred if it leads somewhere real. There’s a sense of gnosticism, sure, but also the kinds of details you don’t get unless you’ve stared at a bedroom ceiling for years hoping for something better as you ponder days of tour weariness, all while navigating familial awkwardness, creature comforts and high school trauma, and it’s all delivered in one-liner parables that sound like memes until they suddenly don’t. “I walked into the ocean at Long Beach / It spit out plastic and didn’t treat me any different.” That’s not just a lyric. That’s a diagnosis. “Kids who don’t know why they bleed / Because they couldn’t meet their parents’ needs.” That line sneaks up on you in the middle of a song that, just one verse earlier, was playing with novelty-song punchlines.
But beneath all the noise, the album holds to something elemental: the need to be known, even if that knowing comes with confusion, contradiction, or collapse. Even if the form is falling apart. The Scholars doesn’t reinvent Car Seat Headrest so much as it lays them bare. There are still guitars and gut punches and long-winded breakdowns. There are still climaxes that feel earned and moments that hit like divine revelations. The difference is that, now, the band have become comfortable with the notion that every misstep, every myth, every long verse that comes along the path of the process is part of, if not essential to, the project.
So when Toledo yells into the ether, “Take a look at what’s left, a fading sense of regret” on the final track, such a line doesn’t tie things up. It lands like a resignation. Or maybe, finally, a release. The Scholars is less a statement than a constellation. And somehow, it ends not with despair – but with a small, persistent light. A door not just cracked open, but propped wide.
