The anticipated follow-up to ‚Teens Of Denial‘ includes some of Will Toledo’s best and worst songs.
Sometimes the only thing more difficult than making an instant classic is figuring out what to do next. For Will Toledo of Car Seat Headrest, whose 2016 album Teens Of Denial was one of the best indie-rock LPs of the previous decade, this process has dragged on for several years. Though unlike a lot of artists who have been in this position, Toledo hasn’t wasted time doing nothing. He’s worked throughout this fraught period, though at times it’s seemed as though he’s rigorously chasing his own tail.
In 2018, Toledo released a re-recorded version of one his greatest early LPs, Twin Fantasy. Originally put out seven years earlier on Bandcamp, Twin Fantasy was already an epic song cycle, though Toledo could now afford to lavish it with the spoils of a bigger production budget and his own improved skills as a record-maker. But as impressive as the Twin Fantasy redux was sonically, the project ultimately felt pointless, like tracing over a beautiful drawing with a more expensive pen. Instead of focusing on his next step, he was obsessing over “improving” an old album that was already great.
It turns out, however, that all the while Toledo was also working on a proper follow-up to Teens Of Denial, which finally arrives today after four years of tinkering in the form of Making A Door Less Open. It is the epitome of an “I don’t know what to do next” record, similar in some ways to the music U2 made in the ’90s after Achtung Baby, specifically in how Toledo has inevitably pursued the “electronic” detour that’s de rigueur for ambitious guitar acts, and also because he’s adopted a MacPhisto-like alter ego to free him from the spotlight’s glare. (More on that in a moment.)
To his credit, Toledo has truly hit upon a new artistic direction, dramatically simplifying his song structures and favoring sprawling, ambient soundscapes over overstuffed classicist rock. While markedly less dazzling than Teens Of Denial, Making A Door Less Open succeeds modestly because Toledo opts to not top his masterwork, instead carving a deliberately bumpier, less consistent path beyond it. This won’t be your favorite CSH record, but it will probably be the one you’re tempted to defend as “underrated.
