Car Seat Headrest performs tomorrow night (Saturday, January 23) with PWR BTTM and Naked Giants at Mississippi Studios (3939 N Mississippi). Details here.
Since May 2010, Will Toledo has been putting music on Bandcamp under the name Car Seat Headrest. Lots of music.
According to the listed release dates, Toledo, now 23 years old, posted five albums—70 tracks in total—in 2010 alone. Five more recent LPs follow: two in 2011 and one each in 2012, 2013, and 2014. On 2014’s How to Leave Town, you can practically hear Toledo’s musical palette (and palate) expanding at mind-bending speed. Its 14-minute opening track, “The Ending of Dramamine,” builds slowly from serrated synth jam to mumbled self-flagellation to a skronky, backmasked outro that Toledo says is probably the closest Car Seat Headrest will ever get to sounding like one of his current favorite bands, Swans.
By the time Toledo released How to Leave Town, he’d built up a significant following, largely by recording quality music, putting it on the internet, being patient, and letting word of mouth do the work. With no record label, no publicist, or any other industry push, he sold more than 25,000 downloads on Bandcamp, landed on the site’s most-downloaded chart, and attracted the attention of respected super-indie Matador Records.
“[Music] really just became the only thing that I did have figured out. I was having a lot of trouble navigating anything else in life,” Toledo says. “Music just seemed like the one thing that I never had to worry about.”
A year and a half ago, Toledo moved across the country to the Seattle suburb of Kirkland, Washington, where he has found a tribe and re-recorded several songs from his back catalog for a compilation called Teens of Style that Matador released last fall. It is perhaps the most concise Car Seat Headrest collection yet, highlighting Toledo’s gift for sharp, fuzzy guitar lines and melodies that soar even though they sound like they were recorded under a heavy blanket at the bottom of a cave. Like Bob Pollard of Guided by Voices, there is no recording technique crude enough to suppress Toledo’s pop craft.
Teens of Style‘s tracklist consists of “songs from earlier that I felt might get overlooked if I just went on and did the next new thing,” Toledo says. That won’t be an issue now. The album was praised by prominent outlets like the New York Times and Pitchfork, and found its way onto many year-end lists of 2015’s best records.