Calling in from his spare room in Seattle, Will Toledo might be sat in front of an immediately recognisable lime green ‘Brat’ poster, but that’s where any notably modern reference points start and end for the Car Seat Headrest frontman. Bespectacled and sporting a thick woolen jumper, instead Toledo has spent the last 15 years steering his project from prolific lo-fi bedroom endeavour to one of America’s most beloved alternative groups in his own idiosyncratic way.
With tens of millions of streams and a rabid online fanbase, Car Seat Headrest remain a cult band not in stature but in spirit: booksmart but self-aware, with a penchant for sprawling songs that stretch over ten minutes and beyond, they should have no place stoking the TikTok algorithm and yet, somehow, their proudly intelligent indie-rock has cut through.
It reaches its most gloriously singular apex with this month’s thirteenth album, The Scholars. A high-concept rock opera, the record is both wildly ambitious and yet surprisingly sonically accessible. There is one track, Planet Desperation, that unfolds as a conversation between mortals, ghosts and the ‘lizard brain’ over an epic, nearly twenty-minute run time, but there are also air punch-worthy hooks and climactic pay-offs throughout.
Based around two warring colleges, Parnassus University and the neighbouring clown school, it tells a classic tale of fractured systems, and the old guard versus the new. “You have this central figure, this Shakespeare stand-in from centuries past who started this college with the two [schools] together, and since then they’ve been warring back and forth,” Toledo explains. “It’s a pattern I see crop up a lot, whether in the Christian church with Catholics and Protestants, or in families breaking off and coming together.” It is also, we point out to an entirely blank reception, essentially the plot of Wicked. “OK…” the frontman nods, uncomprehendingly. “I'll have to check that out sometime…”
That Toledo is not up to speed with the pink and green world of Arianna Grande and Cynthia Erivo isn’t overly surprising. Since his first days back in 2010, self-releasing Garageband records on Bandcamp, the musician has gone about creating a pocket of culture that exists in its own carefully nurtured bubble. Car Seat Headrest began online and has always thrived there, with hardcore Reddit communities dissecting his every move to the point that, in 2018, he had to issue a statement asking fans to “chill the fuck out and make a minimal effort to be a decent human being”. But, for Toledo, the internet has always been a way to find like-minded people away from the mainstream rather than a simple extension of it.
“My generation came up when the internet was this cool new place to be. It wasn’t where all your friends in the homeroom or the cafeteria were, so you could have this secret world to escape to, and then everyone started escaping to it, and now it’s no escape at all,” he says. “So the important thing now is to keep those bubbles within it where there’s resistance to just letting everything be that mainstream line of thought.”
Artistically, Car Seat Headrest maintain the resistance by creating special worlds for their fans to invest in - be it via the online “scavenger hunt” they made in the run up to The Scholars, or on their Discord, where they regularly tune in to chat. “It doesn’t feel like the falseness of social media interaction and those parasocial interactions - that flavour of it isn’t there,” Toledo says. Personally, meanwhile, the subcultures of the internet have gifted Toledo his own pocket of salvation. Identifying as part of the Furry community, Car Seat Headrest have long been known as a Furry band, with Toledo playing a 2022 show in New York dressed as his alter-ego, Mortis Jackrabbit.
“[The furry community] also has to do with me coming up online - it was all part of it, and it was nice to have this character and this world and these ideas that you could disappear into where it would be a little bit of an escape. It’s been important for me, and it’s important for a lot of other people, to just have that space to pretend and be different and avoid the binaries that we fall into in day to day life. To just have an imaginative space for things,” he explains.
That New York show, at the city’s 1,800-capacity Brooklyn Steel, was gleefully received. “It was a little scary by the end because people were really going crazy in the front row,” Toledo remembers. With a firmly open-minded and liberal fanbase, many of whom also belong in the Furry world, he’d be “more worried about our fans gathered outside the show than us” were the band to take Mortis Jackrabbit to more conservative parts of the US right now. That fear, he suggests, speaks to the greater need to foster these communities across the country.
“More and more people in queer communities, or who are just different growing up, start gathering friends online and then, by the time they’re able to move, they just head elsewhere. I continue to see a mass exodus out of these more conservative areas and I understand why people do it but it is a bit of a bummer to me,” he says. “When everyone who’s a little different leaves a city then it just stays the same and stagnates. I hope we can get more of a national culture or tolerance so it’s not just a few major, progressive cities and then a lot of smaller, conservative cities and towns.”
In Seattle particularly, Furry music is thriving: it’s not the lingering legacy of grunge that permeates the area, but a new group of artists - in part due to Toledo and the band’s visible presence. “When I was coming up, music was not an emphasised part of that community, but now Furry music is a very big alternative scene these days,” he says. “You see all over with Furry-centric music festivals, and Seattle has become one of the hubs where that happens.”
Having contracted Long Covid at the end of 2022, forcing Car Seat Headrest to cancel their remaining tour dates and keep to a fraction of their usual live commitments as Toledo slowly built himself back up from both the illness and an adjacently-discovered histamine imbalance, the frontman has been spending a lot more time seeing these things at home. The challenge these days is asking, “How much can I do without pushing my health?” he says.
In support of The Scholars, they’re planning on playing a few shows in America - “some of them will probably be the biggest shows we’ve done” - but plans further afield are still on hold. A step back from the intense spotlight of being front and centre, it seems, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “When I’m on stage, my favourite shows are when I’m not the frontman; when I can just go on as a guest for someone else,” he says. “I don’t really want to think of my career as needing to tour every year; I’d rather write or produce or do things more from home.”
With Car Seat Headrest now a bigger proposition than ever, for Toledo, the journey has been about managing fame and attention in his own way: of doubling down on the integrity and artistry even while the world gets crazier around him. “I got a TikTok and tried to post on it once and couldn’t really figure it out so I gave up,” he chuckles. “But I don’t worry about it so much because the people that just create for TikTok - if that’s what they wanna do then that’s what they wanna do. But for the people that want to create music that really drives them and fills a deeper need, they’re gonna be looking at better models for doing it. That’s what I try to provide.”
Car Seat Headrest’s new album The Scholars is out now
