Car Seat Headrest are back. Today, the band is announcing their new album The Scholars, which will be released on May 2 via Matador. They’ve also shared a new single, an astounding 11-minute epic called ‘Gethsemane’, alongside a short film from director Andrew Wonder. Check it out and find the album cover and track list below.
The Scholars is set at the fictional college campus of Parnassus University, which is populated “with students and staff whose travails illuminate a loose narrative of life, death, and rebirth,” according to a press release. (Parnassus is an actual mountain range in Greece.)
About the character piece accompanying ‘Gethsemane’, the Will Toledo-led band had this to say: “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’s last album was 2020’s Making a Door Less Open. Commenting on the trajectory of the band, Toledo said: “What we’ve been doing more of in recent years is just taking the pulses of each other. 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 Cover Artwork:
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
