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If you’re thinking about diving into The Scholars, the new album from Car Seat Headrest, don’t mess around. Go past the three-minute songs, and the four-minute one and the eight-minute one, and the 10- and 11-minute ones, too. Go straight to the main event, the 18-minute “Planet Desperation.” Will Toledo goes on an epic search for his “gnostic soul,” seeking his way through Bowie-esque music-hall wallow, New Wave kicks, Queen-ly chorale, arena-rock ecstasy, flower-headed folk, heart-spilling piano beauty, Dead-ish space-drum vertigo, and much more, taking so...

Car Seat Headrest’s The Scholars isn’t the band’s first dalliance with a narrative format. Their 2011 album Twin Fantasy, which was re-recorded and re-released in 2018, is a concept album about adolescent self-discovery and sexual awakening. The Scholars similarly centers on young adults, but these characters are less concerned with sex and drugs than the esoteric traditions and mysterious happenings at the fictional Parnassus University. The story is vague as best, introducing enigmatic figures like a med student with supernatural healing powers and an aspiring furry with an overbearing mom, before climaxing with a destructive raid by students from Parnassus’s neighboring rival Clown College.

It’s an especially fraught time for academia, what with centuries of tradition seemingly in peril of being trashed by clowns, and this 70-minute rock opera touches on those institutional anxieties. The track “Equals” alludes to an oft-publicized culture of mob justice wherein one...

Car Seat Headrest is back. The Will Toledo-led indie rock outfit has officially announced a new album called The Scholars, which is set for release on May 2nd via Matador records. Additionally, the band unveiled a string of new 2025 United States tour dates and a music video for the lead single “Gethsemane.”

The Scholars is the first full-length effort from Car Seat Headrest since 2020’s Making a Door Less Open. A concept record set at the fictional college campus of Parnassus University, the new album follows the protagonist Rosa as she navigates the surreal happenings of Pu. Pre-orders for the album are ongoing.

“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,” the band explained in a statement. “Each night, instead of dreams, she encounters the raw pain and stories of the...

Will Toledo has taken fans of his band, Car Seat Headrest, on some epic adventures over the years, leading them through concept albums full of lengthy songs and countless thrilling concerts. But he’s never spun a story quite as dramatic as the one he’s revealing this spring.

The Scholars, out May 2 on Matador Records, features at least a dozen distinct characters, in settings that include a mysterious university and a clown school. There are references to a 16th-century Venetian playwright, an old American folk song, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.