Car Seat Headrest's "The Catastrophe" is an Anthemic Return to Form

Car Seat Headrest’s music has always embodied a sense of misfit community. Ever since he started recording lo-fi experiments in the backseat of his family’s car as a teenager in Virginia, frontman Will Toledo has been honing a specific brand of messy and ambitious indie rock, that, at its best, can transform feelings of awkwardness and insecurity into communal catharsis. Halfway through “Bodys” for instance, one of the band’s best songs (and arguably one of the best rock songs of the 2010s), Toledo embraces those around him, declaring over and over that “these are the people that I get drunk with / these are the people I fell in love with,” before launching back into the track’s soaring chorus. It’s moments like these that make Car Seat Headrest’s music so inviting and so satisfying: the feeling that you, too, are welcome to join this quirky crew of headbanging outcasts.

On "The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That Man)," a highlight from the band's new album, The Scholars, Toledo and Co. double down on that sense of community. Over bright guitar strums and propulsive drums, Toledo extends an open invitation to the listener: "If you're looking for one light of hope amidst the pile of bones, well you can come with us tonight." Though ostensibly about a group of clown troubadours touring around Parnassus University, the fictitious college at the center of the The Scholars, "The Catastrophe" could slot seamlessly into any coming of age story. Musically, too, it conjures rock music's most classic documents of youthful angst and suburban escape—Born to Run, American Idiot, The Suburbs—with healthy doses of power chords and communal "woo-oohs" for good measure. Like much of Car Seat Headrest's best work, "The Catastrophe" is sincere, offbeat, and affecting, and like countless angsty rock songs that came before it, feels destined to console and inspire outcasts and misfits everywhere.