Car Seat Headrest will release their new album The Scholars, on May 2nd via Matador Records. The LP, is the band’s first studio album in five years. Ahead of the release, they have shared opening track “CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You)”. “The video for the song features illustrations of the characters who appear across The Scholars designed by cartoonist Cate Wurtz. Set at the fictional college campus Parnassus University, the album’s songs are populated with students and staff whose travails illuminate a loose narrative of life, death, and rebirth. The single follows previous release “Gethsemane.”

Set at the fictional college campus Parnassus University, the album’s songs are populated with students and staff whose travails illuminate a loose narrative of life, death, and rebirth. Here’s what the band has to say about the character at the center of “CCF’:

Beolco is a student of Parnassus University, a college founded in ages past by a famed playwright known as the Scop. Beolco is deeply fond of both the college and the Scop, believing himself to be spiritually connected or reincarnated from the playwright. He yearns for confirmation of this secret belief.

“Beolco is a student of Parnassus University, a college founded in ages past by a famed playwright known as the Scop. Beolco is deeply fond of both the college and the Scop, believing himself to be spiritually connected or reincarnated from the playwright. He yearns for confirmation of this secret belief.”

However, the band was soon sidelined again, this time due to illness. This hiatus resulted in a sustained period of contemplation and reflection for Toledo, which ultimately shaped The Scholars. Inspired by an apocryphal poem by “Archbishop Guillermo Guadalupe del Toledo,” and featuring character designs from Toledo’s friend, the cartoonist Cate Wurtz, the album focuses on the yearning and spiritual crisis of the titular Scholars. They range from the doubt-filled playwright Beolco to Devereaux, a person born to religious conservatives who finds themselves desperate for higher guidance. Meanwhile, the music draws, carefully, from classic rock story song cycles such as The Who’s Tommy and David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

Car Seat Headrest started as Toledo’s solo project, it is now fully a band. “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,” he explains. “That’s been a big journey.”

Car Seat Headrest
The Scholars
Tracklisting
Matador Records

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

Car Seat Headrest 2025 Tour dates

May 16 – Salt Lake City, UT – Kilby Block Party
June 7 – New York, NY – Governors Ball
June 28 – Washington, DC – The Anthem
July 12 – Denver, CO – Mission Ballroom
July 26 – Chicago, IL – Salt Shed (Fairgrounds) SOLD OUT
August 8 – Los Angeles, CA – The Greek
September 12 – Philadelphia, PA – Highmark Skyline at the Mann Center
September 27 – Boston, MA – MGM Music Hall
November 1 – Oakland, CA – The Fox

Pre-order The Scholars by Car Seat Headrest HERE