Hard to think it’s been half a decade since last self-made Virginia indie heavyweights Car Seat Headrest graced our ears on Making A Door Less Open. They break their hiatus with the cerebral, sprawling, multi-part “Gethsemane,” the lead single off their upcoming thirteenth studio record, The Scholars, slated for a May 2nd release via Matador Records. It is accompanied by a ghoulish sidewinder of a 13-minute black-and-white music video/short-film. Frontman and Bandcamp aficionado Will Toledo self-describes the upcoming record as a “nine track rock opera,” the impenetrable kind with which one has no hopes of following narratively without a playbill.  The premise in short is that at the fictional Parnassus University, each track will center on a different student or staff member – an “exercise in empathy,” Toledo states –  a series of tales about transformation, love, pain, death, and reckoning face-to-face with inevitability. The band’s official website features an augmented reality game that has teased out snippets of the record for the past two weeks.

The new lead single follows medical student Rosa  and a back-and-forth with Behemoth as she learns to master her powers of absorbing another person’s pain. The mythology-laden lyrics allude to biblical references as our protagonist resurrects a deceased patient, growing less lucid as she takes on their memories, ultimately drawing her closer underground to a secret facility where insidious beings concoct cloaked plans for the campus of Parnassus. Would one be able to surmise all of this by simply observing the lyrics? Absolutely not. This is Toledo & co. leaning the most they ever have into their ’70s rock inspirations, from prog-rock pacing and punishing riffs to narrative rabbit holes that demand required-reading ancillary material. The multi-part track snakes in and out of shadowy environs, basking rarely in the light with the anchoring lyric “You can love again if you try again.” Car Seat Headrest will take to a reduced tour schedule in promotion of the new record, following a series of health complications that Will faced in the wake of COVID. The full list of tour appearances can be found below:

You can listen to “Gethsemane” below: