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Mar 04, 2025 By Mark Redfern Photography by Carlos Cruz

Car Seat Headrest have announced a new album/rock opera, The Scholars, and shared its first single, the 11-minute multi-part track “Gethsemane,” via a short film. They have also announced some new tour dates. The Scholars is due out May 2 via Matador. Below, check out the single, album details, and tour dates.

A press release explains the concept of the album in greater detail: “Set at the fictional college campus Parnassus University, the songs on The Scholars are populated with students and staff whose travails illuminate a loose narrative of life, death, and rebirth.”

The band collectively had this to say about “Gethsemane” in the press release: “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.”

Car Seat Headrest is frontman Will Toledo, lead guitarist Ethan Ives, drummer Andrew Katz, and bassist Seth Dalby. The band’s last album, Making a Door Less Open, came out in 2020 via Matador, meaning the band’s touring for that album was derailed by the pandemic.

Toledo self-produced the album, which has a wide range of influences, including Shakespeare, Mozart, classical opera, The Who’s Tommy, and David 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 says. “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.”

Car Seat Headrest started out as a solo project from Toledo, but over the years has grown into a full on collaborative band.

“What we’ve been doing more of in recent years is just taking the pulses of each other,” says Toledo. “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. 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.”

The Scholars Tracklist:

1. CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You)
2. Devereaux
3. Lady Gay Approximately
4. The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man)
5. Equals
6. Gethsemane
7. Reality
8. Planet Desperation
9. True/False Lover

Car Seat Headrest Tour Dates:

May 16 - Salt Lake City, UT - Kilby Block Party
June 7 - New York, NY - Governors Ball
June 28 - Washington, DC - The Anthem
July 12 - Denver, CO - Mission Ballroom
July 26 - Chicago, IL - Salt Shed (Fairgrounds)
August 8 - Los Angeles, CA - The Greek
September 12 - Philadelphia, PA - Highmark Skyline at the Mann Center
September 27 - Boston, MA - MGM Music Hall
November 1 - Oakland, CA - The Fox

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