Car Seat Headrest

It's nothing new for Will Toledo to revisit his old work; with a boundless archive of albums recorded in his teenage years at his disposal, the Virginia-born singer has always treated digging up old songs from his catalogue as something close to standard compositional practice, sometimes simply tweaking them, other times reworking them completely, flipping their meaning and structure on their head.
Maybe it's because more than half his discography is marred by poor audio quality, having been recorded as a one-man band in his parents' car. Or maybe it's down to a personal conception of songs that he himself has repeatedly described as never truly finished, always in flux — either way, Toledo has always found it interesting, perhaps stimulating, to dig back into the old songs of his repertoire, and has embarked more than once on the (never trivial) undertaking of re-recording.
After signing to Matador Records and recording an album of remakes culled from his back catalogue, young Will released his first album of new material of the Matador era in 2016. “Teens Of Denial” would go on to receive completely unexpected acclaim, establishing itself as a cornerstone of 2010s indie rock and cementing a band that, we can now say, defined and rewrote the rules of a genre that ten years ago looked increasingly bland and stale.

It's 2026. A full 10 years have passed since the release of “Teens Of Denial”, 10 years since one of the last albums we might call generational, 10 years since a record that made a band's name and defined and told the story of a generation of angry, but ultimately fragile, teenagers. And it's after 10 years, after living through years of long Covid and growing ever more deeply tied to religion, that Will Toledo has decided to put his hands back on the record that launched him onto the international stage — perhaps the hardest chapter of his discography to revisit. One reason for this initial hesitation — understandable to anyone who loved “Teens Of Denial” when it first came out — is the already excellent production the original album boasted: raw and unvarnished, yet at the same time clear and bright in a way never before heard in the Car Seat Headrest discography.
This new “Joe's Story”, however, is not (at least sonically) a re-recording — it's more of a remaster, in the sense that virtually no instrument has been re-tracked from scratch. Instead, each song has undergone a more or less noticeable process, depending on the track, of remixing and remastering, aimed at intervening on the original material rather than replacing it outright.
The vocals deserve a separate discussion, as they have largely been re-recorded, with the nervy, inexperienced-kid timbre of 2016 Toledo giving way to the more controlled, deeper tone of a man now in his thirties, whose maturity is increasingly, inevitably audible. The decision to re-record the vocals stems largely from the rewriting — this time far more pronounced — of some of the lyrics, or rather from the shift in meaning they now carry. The result amounts to a full-blown concept album that tells the story of the teenager Joe within a more complete and linear narrative.

The opening track “Fill In The Blank” is one of the generational anthems that made “Teens Of Denial” the album it was and has become over the years. In this new version (musically untouched) we meet the protagonist Joe, grappling with despair over the death of his brother Matt, who was terminally ill. Rather than mourning the loss, Joe uses anger as a way to cope with the searing pain running through him, in a chorus as charged as it is emotional, in which relatives and acquaintances attack the legitimacy of his feelings, as though depression weren't a real problem but a situation one simply fails to escape for lack of willpower and motivation. Joe answers back in the song's final chorus, furiously claiming and screaming his right (and that of every teenager who "hasn't known enough of the world") to be depressed.
Joe's January and February drift by in dissolution, in a thousand nights lost to alcohol and drugs, alongside friends who, just as desperately as he is, are searching for some way to fill their own sense of emptiness. This passage is tackled in the chaotic “Vincent”, a genuine spiral of self-destruction in which the protagonist, at a party, finds himself clouded by alcohol and, in turn, immediately by the void and depression he'd rather not confront. It's a face-to-face monologue with his own conscience, set to indie rock with sounds and a structure entirely unlike anything before, one that sounds like a spontaneous scream, like a cry for help too muddled to be taken seriously.

In the following, immensely powerful “Destroyed By Hippie Powers”, Joe finds himself having to skip a gig with his band because he's too out of it thanks to the "Powers of the Hippies" (psychedelic drugs). The original track, which had Joe at a party, lines up with the ending of this new version, in which our protagonist lets out an anguished scream, asking himself what happened to "that chubby kid who smiled so much and loved the Beach Boys", eventually admitting he has metaphorically killed off his innocent, uncontaminated younger self to make room for his teenage "self", now inevitably corrupted by the "hippie powers".
On the acoustic “Drugs With Friends”, Joe is suspended from school and spends his days taking drugs with his friends. After eating some hallucinogenic mushrooms, he ends up lying on the floor, talking to Jesus, who takes offence at his behaviour; Joe has sunk to such a low point that he feels rejected even by Jesus Christ himself. The final climax reflects on why teenagers turn to drugs in the first place, posing a question that's left unanswered: do we get high with friends because drugs are better with company, or do friends get better with drugs? Here, as in every track on this new “Teens Of Denial”, Toledo has chosen to strip out every swear word and piece of coarse language from the lyrics, a choice driven by the American frontman's increasingly firm and pronounced conversion to Catholicism. This "censorship" has left many fans of the band puzzled, with some accusing Toledo of distorting an album whose very foundation lies in a spontaneity and rage that helped make it so powerful and relatable.

The brand new, fresh “Optimistic Son”, which replaces the original album's “Not What I Needed”, sounds like it could have come straight off “The Scholars”, the band's latest album. Its unusual structure, with the chorus held back until the final minutes of the song, is preceded by harmonically unstable verses, governed by transient tonicizations, which give way to "fake choruses" that, as noted above, merely serve as a prelude to the true, irresistible final refrain.
“Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales”, the album's true masterpiece, features Will Toledo's vocals completely re-recorded. Its structure, identical in intent to the preceding “Optimistic Son”, delays the final chorus until the explosive arrival of this album's signature line. Toledo depicts the unconscious patterns of our minds as "drunk drivers", leading us to hurt ourselves and others, just like actual drunk drivers. During the car ride, Joe actually undertakes a journey of self-awareness, realising that his ego was shaped by something he learned, and that he, like all of us, has the chance to relearn it "like a baby who's never made a mistake, who hasn't taken that first wrong step", and become the person he wants to be. The simple act of trying, of getting out of the car, becomes a battle against a world that "doesn't have to be this way". Even though "there's no comfort in responsibility", we can change our behaviour by interrupting, and ceasing to feed, a harmful pattern.

We're nearing the album's final stretch, and yet it's here that the most majestic tracks appear, the most elegantly imposing and dense, as they try to make sense of things, to find a way out of the tunnel of pain in which Joe still seems to be — partly, at least — stuck in the dark. “Cosmic Hero” finds Joe once again submerged in relentless depression, one that even leads him to consider suicide. The track is an interior monologue in which the protagonist builds up rage and picks up the thread of “Drunk Drivers”, according to which it's necessary to build something new, a fresh starting point. Joe knows that real change demands a radical transformation of the self, and responds with a flat rejection of the comforting voice telling him that "everything's going to be fine", convinced that peace, for him, can only emerge from a direct confrontation with his own ego.
The solemn, elegant “The Ballad Of Costa Concordia” is replaced in this new version of the album by “The Ravenous House”, a track musically identical but with lyrics rewritten in every line. The song is split into three closely linked sections that trace the different emotional states Joe moves through on his way out of this phase. The first section, wrapped in heavy, repetitive guitar chords, gives us, for the first time, a lucid, almost composed Joe, one who clearly analyses what he's going through following his brother's death. He recounts his alienation, his rejection of the care and help offered by the people who love him, and the way he's shut himself off from them, which has driven him toward self-destruction. From these very people, from whom he wanted love and attention, he now steals alcohol, or the car, to get even more wasted. But what is love, really, then? Where does it come from: the drugs he takes, or the people who, in spite of everything, keep waiting for him at home, still loving him after being trampled on again and again. Joe is marked by guilt, clouded by the voices that, in the song's second section, pile up relentlessly on top of one another; how could he even look his parents in the eye, how could he ever get back that love he's rejected for so long? He's hit rock bottom, and he'll probably stay there forever, unless he takes that necessary step to change.

Will Toledo has chosen to cut the swearing from “Joe's Story”; maybe it's his way of changing, maybe religion has led him to find the love that Joe rejected throughout the record. Maybe he's put his conscience and his ego back together, and now, ten years on, he knows where he wants to go. That nervy kid from 2016, like Joe, has found the love he deserved, in a world where teenagers are subjected to performance, to a depressive hedonism that keeps them trapped in a system they didn't build but must adapt to all the same. Maybe Will Toledo has found his place. After all, to quote his latest record, "You Can Love Again If You Try Again".

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17/07/2026