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Apr 29, 2025 By Mark Redfern Photography by Carlos Cruz

Car Seat Headrest are releasing a new album/rock opera, The Scholars, this Friday via Matador. Now they have shared its third single, “The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That Man).” Listen below.

Previously the band shared the album’s first single, the 11-minute multi-part track “Gethsemane,” via a short film. It was #1 on our Songs of the Week list. Then they shared its second single, the eight-minute “CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You),” via an animated video below. It also landed on Songs of the Week.

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.”

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.”

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