New Album Due For Car Seat Headrest

Car Seat Headrest fans, new and old alike, will be elated to learn that Will Toledo’s 2011’s Bandcamp masterpiece, Twin Fantasy, has been re-recorded and re-imagined and will come out on Friday 16 Feburary via Matador Records / Remote Control. The album will be available on digital, vinyl and as a double CD including both Twin Fantasy (2017 version) and Twin Fantasy – Mirror To Mirror (re-mastered 2011 version.)

Car Seat Headrest will bring its explosive and revelatory live show to Australia, playing Sydney City Limits and sideshows in Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth this February and March.

The album announcement comes with the release of Nervous Young Inhumans and its accompanying video. It is a frenetic, anthemic, split-screen choreographed crescendo, and the result of Toledo’s visionary work as a first-time director.

Toledo always knew he would return to Twin Fantasy. He never did complete the album. Not really. Never could square his grand ambitions against his mechanical limitations. Listen to his first attempt, recorded at nineteen on a cheap laptop, and you’ll hear what Brian Eno fondly calls “the sound of failure” – thrilling, extraordinary, and singularly compelling failure. Will’s first love, rendered in the vivid teenage viscera of stolen gin, bruised shins, and weird sex, was an event too momentous for the medium assigned to record it.

Even so, even awkward and amateurish, Twin Fantasy is deeply, truly adored by fans. “It was never a finished work,” Toledo says, “and it wasn’t until last year that I figured out how to finish it.” He has, now, the benefit of a bigger budget, a full band in fine form, and endless time to tinker. It took eight months of mixing just to get the drums right. But this is no shallow second take, sanitized in studio and scrubbed of feeling. This is the album he always wanted to make. It sounds the way he always wanted it to sound.

It’s been hard, stepping into the shoes of his teenage self, walking back to painful places. There are lyrics he wouldn’t write again, an especially sad song he regards as an albatross. But even as he carries the weight of that younger, wounded Toledo, he moves forward. He grows. He revises, gently, the songs we love so much. In the album’s final moments, in those “apologies to future me’s and you’s,” there is more forgiveness than fury.

This, Toledo says, is the most vital difference between the old and the new: he no longer sees his own story as a tragedy.

Pre-order Twin Fantasy: https://RemoteControl.lnk.to/TwinFantasy

Car Seat Headrest – Twin Fantasy is out Friday 16 February
via Matador Records / Remote Control Records.