You cannot accuse Car Seat Headrest, AKA Will Toledo, of taking the easy route. Four years on from the release of breakthrough record Teens of Denial, Toledo is back with new album Making a Door Less Open, only now he is going under the name Trait and is wearing a gas mask in photos. Toledo’s restless and impassioned indie rock is looking a little different, too. The new album blends his classic songwriting chops with a bold exploration of electronic textures. This is the result of essentially making the album twice: once as Car Seat Headrest, and again alongside producer Andrew Katz as their jokey EDM side project 1 Trait Danger, before landing on a middle ground.
“My process is always reactive [when making a new record],” Toledo says over the phone from his home in Seattle. “I didn’t have any concrete ideas beyond something that did not sound like Teens of Denial.” Repeating the formula that made Car Seat Headrest one of the most critically acclaimed new acts in recent years “wasn’t even a possibility”. If anything, his success thus far was more reason to embark on a musical pivot. “I’m driving the car and I know where I want to go,” he says. “Now people can really see what I’m capable of.”
In reality, Making a Door Less Open is not the huge leap in sound that it may first appear – guitars bristle and explode throughout the scabrous Hollywood, while Toledo’s love of Radiohead’s Kid A shows itself in the glitchy pulses of Martin and Can’t Cool Me Down. The prolific artist – this is somehow the 27-year-old Toledo’s 13th album – admits that he is “too much of a shut-in’’ to embrace club culture and argues “good party music is songs you can listen to on your own or in a group setting. The goal was to make music that could flip-flop like that.”
Escaping his introverted tendencies is also at the heart of Toledo’s Trait character. It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to deduce that wearing a mask is one way to escape; Toledo is quick to cop to this. “Trait is a creature filled with exuberant energy. The character is a way to be an embodiment of that energy rather than some schmuck with a microphone.”
He needn’t be so bashful. By effectively collaborating with himself, Toledo has avoided the pitfalls of repetition and complacency; a trap that he recognises makes some bands sound “conservative”, amid a lack of “tension” between old friends who have become overly comfortable. Making a Door Less Open has also shown a new path for artists, who can now collaborate with their own alter ego. In a period when getting into the studio with someone else isn’t possible, it might just be an unlikely way forward.
