Car Seat Headrest – Gethsemane

Car Seat Headrest emerges from a five-year hiatus with “Gethsemane,” an 11-minute epic that serves as our first taste of their upcoming rock opera, “The Scholars,” set for release on May 2nd via Matador Records.

“The Scholars” wasn’t an easy birth. Following 2020’s “Making a Door Less Open,” which coincided with the pandemic shutdown, frontman Will Toledo suffered from long COVID, developing a histamine imbalance that required significant lifestyle changes. During this period of forced rest, Toledo delved into spiritual practices, beginning with meditation apps and eventually exploring Chan meditation and Buddhism. These experiences deeply informed the album’s themes.

Set at the fictional Parnassus University, “The Scholars” follows various students and staff members, each song illuminating a different character within a loose narrative of life, death, and rebirth. “Gethsemane” specifically follows Rosa, a medical student who discovers she can revive deceased patients by absorbing their pain—a power she had suppressed since childhood. As she navigates this ability, “reality blurs, and she finds herself taken deep into secret facilities beneath the medical school, where ancient beings that covertly reign over the college bring forth their dark plans.”

Toledo draws inspiration from an eclectic mix of sources—from Shakespeare to Mozart to classic rock operas like The Who’s “Tommy” and Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust.” But he was careful not to sacrifice individual songs for narrative flow: “One thing that can be a struggle with rock operas is that the individual songs kind of get sacrificed for the flow of the plot. I didn’t want to sacrifice that to make a very fluid narrative.”

What began as Toledo’s solo project has truly become a band. “What we’ve been doing more of in recent years is just taking the pulses of each other,” Toledo reflects. “I was coming out of it as a solo project and it always just felt like it was in pieces… And 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.”