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Apr 16, 2020 By Christopher Roberts Car Seat Headrest

Car Seat Headrest (aka Will Toledo and band) are releasing a new album, Making a Door Less Open, on May 1 via Matador. Now they have shared another song from it, “Hollywood,” via an animated video for the track. The song takes on Hollywood, challenging its myth as a dream factory. Watch the Sabrina Nichols-directed video below.

Toledo had this to say about the song in a press release: “This song is about Hollywood as a place where people go to make their fantasies come to life, and they end up exploiting other people and doing terrible things to maintain their fantasy. There’s this terror you’re going to lose the fantasy, and you’re going to have to face the facts, and some people will do anything to avoid facing that. It’s about that fear, and the pain of being subjugated to someone else’s fantasy against your will, and it’s all tied together under this banner of this physical location of Hollywood that we all know about and dream about, but none of us really want to think about what is going on behind the scenes there.”

Previously Car Seat Headrest shared the album’s first single, “Cool Me Down.” “Cool Me Down” was one of our Songs of the Week. Then they shared another song from it, “Martin,” via a lyric video for the track (which was also one of our Songs of the Week).

Car Seat Headrest’s last album, Twin Fantasy, came out in 2018 via Matador. It was a re-imagined version of an album also titled Twin Fantasy that Toledo self-released to Bandcamp in 2011. But his last album of completely new material was 2016’s Teens of Denial. In 2019 the band also released the live album Commit Yourself Completely.

As well as Toledo, the band features Andrew Katz (drums), Ethan Ives (guitar), and Seth Dalby (bass). Making a Door Less Open had a somewhat unique recording process. In a press release it is billed as a collaboration between Car Seat Headrest and 1 Trait Danger, a Car Seat Headrest “electronic side project consisting of drummer Andrew Katz and Toledo’s alternative persona, ‘Trait.’” The album was recorded twice, first with guitars, bass, and drums and then secondly with purely synthesized sounds. Then in the mixing process the two recordings were combined.

Toledo had this to say about the album on the band’s website: “This album was made from January 2015 to December 2019, starting as a collection of vague ideas that eventually turned into songs. I wanted to make something that was different from my previous records, and I struggled to figure out how to do that. I realized that because the way I listened to music had changed, I had to change the way I wrote music, as well. I was listening less and less to albums and more and more to individual songs, songs from all over the place, every few days finding a new one that seemed to have a special energy. I thought that if I could make an album full of songs that had a special energy, each one unique and different in its vision, then that would be a good thing.

“Andrew, Ethan, Seth and I started going into the studio to record songs that had more finished structures and jam on ideas that didn’t. Then I would mess with the recordings until I could see my way to a song. Most of the time on this album was spent shuttling between my house and Andrew’s, who did a lot of the mixing on this. He comes from an EDM school of mixing, so we built up sample-heavy beat-driven songs that could work to both of our strengths.

“Each track is the result of an intense battle to bring out its natural colors and transform it into a complete work. The songs contain elements of EDM, hip hop, futurism, doo-wop, soul, and of course rock and roll. But underneath all these things I think these may be folk songs, because they can be played and sung in many different ways, and they’re about things that are important to a lot of people: anger with society, sickness, loneliness, love…the way this album plays out is just our own interpretation of the tracks, with Andrew, Ethan and I forming a sort of choir of contrasting natures.

“I think my main hope for the world of music is that it will continue to grow by taking from the past, with a consciousness of what still works now. Exciting moments in music always form at a crossroads -a new genre emerges from the pieces of existing ones, an artist strips down a forgotten structure and makes something alien and novel. If there is a new genre emergent in our times, it has not yet been named and identified, but its threads come from new ways of listening to all types of music, of new methods of creating music at an unprecedented level of affordability and personal freedom, of new audiences rising up through the internet to embrace works that would otherwise be lost, and above all from the people whose love of music drives them to create it in the best form they possibly can. Hopefully it will remain nameless for some time, so it can be experienced with that same newness and strangeness that accompanies any and all meaningful encounters with music.”

Also feel free to read our 2015 interview with Car Seat Headrest’s Will Toledo.

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