Picture this: you’re a band of 20-somethings five years and nine albums deep into a career that’s, hitherto now, been flecked with minimal Bandcamp success; your studio has four wheels and four seats to match, and around 10% of your audience are family and pals from school. But then somebody, somewhere grants you the opportunity to re-do it all: to record yourself with newfound clarity, to rearticulate your ideas with a perspective changed by the strange and terrible adulthood you now occupy, or in essence, to think, ‘God, I sound like a dickhead there- let’s change it’.

It’s not your quotidian come-up story, though it is Car Seat Headrest’s, a group of nervous young humans whose imagination of youth as some giant ball of energy drawn and quartered by ennui, hedonism and heartache would transcend from scrappy, inaudible impros to literary enquiries on how to adult. To throw on Teens of Style - a revised and re-recorded compilation album constituted by tracks made from 2010-2015, and their first record for Matador - would be to (still) wonder ‘how the fuck is there a choppier recording of this?’. Though it’s not the subtle clearing of the reverb or the cloudiness of the strings that matters here, rather the rapier wit and bookish observations that frontman, Will Toledo, sharpened off its edge. Their pen would punch through the walls of feedback to reveal thoughts profound as an octogenarian, where promises to friends would become ‘covenants’ bound in divinity; where tangents of thought or thematic detours would be specified with the same earnestness as Adrian Mole. Just glance at lines like  'I want to break something important / I want to kick my dad in the shin' and you can almost picture Toledo releasing a pressure valve, as if pure honesty will wash away the sin of wishing something mean towards somebody you love.

Teens of Denial, the band’s first fully original material for their new label, would show, however, there is no such salve. Barrelling through the spectrum of your youth’s inevitable bad thoughts and feelings, each of its bumps - disappointed parents, substance use and abuse, crippling sadness - is just, well, life, and some silly little songs are never going to change that. But with pristine clarity, if not in sound then in meaning, Toledo’s bookish, nay brawny, barbs flung at all the bullshit are lined with bitter-sweet affirmations: you ‘haven't seen enough of this world yet’ - even if it hurts like hell. 

Hell, indeed, especially when “(Joe Gets Kicked Out of School for Using) Drugs With Friends (But Says This Isn’t a Problem)” hits the needle, and a young man’s hopes for a transcendent mushroom trip are dashed with the fire and brimstone of piss-filled pants, cops in the driveway and a father’s authoritarian wrath. Religion has always been a latent presence underneath CSH’s quotidian teen sheen (after all, Toledo once penned ‘I’ve got to have faith in the one above me / I’ve got to have faith that Lombardi loves me’ in relation to his boss man at Matador and his powers to maketh/taketh away cult stardom) but it’s the frontman’s pained, haggard delivery of ‘Who are you to go against the words of our fathers?’ which really fucking hits: they conjure the image of the moment when a creation finally looks up at its creator and pleads ‘Why? Why did you occupy my existence with such fear and miasma?’. It’s melodramatic, sure. Bad trips come and go, and then come again. But what’s so brilliant about Toledo’s storytelling here is his power to juggle the horrors of this sensation - and the pure comedy of how dumb you actually look - with an epically detailed tapestry on the experiences that make up our actualisation.  

For all its fears of disappearing into the maws of sadness, Teens of Denial demonstrates a ballsiness of the adamantium variety, if not always in lyrical content then in ambition and scope. Take “The Ballad of Costa Concordia”, the 11 1/2 minute behemoth that packs more ideas into its running time than most indie bands of 2023 could say of their whole output, where oceans of self-loathing ebb and flow over horn sections that summon the fogginess of the titular cruise ships doomed seafaring. It begins all trudging and dejected like a fuel-less car relying on the momentum of a steep hill to get on the home straight. Moments of blistering isolation - ‘I stay up late every night / Out of some general protest  / But with no one to tell you to come to bed it’s not really a contest’ - turn the whites of the eyes red and the soul as black as soot. But then, in a sudden coup de théâtre, all these confessions of a defeated spirit - 'I’m going to bed now, I’ve sunk into my sorrows' - calcify into something special, a fireworks show, a young person demanding ‘how the fuck do you do all the things an adult's supposed to do?' ('how was I supposed to know how to steer the ship?'). The answer feels hidden underneath the track's huge, conflagrating guitar arrangements and propulsive drumming, where all its snapping and snarling and kvetching - punctuated by Toledo's defeated screams - replies: 'I don't have the answer for that'. We're just throwing ourselves at the days until life resembles some sort of order. If such a thing exists. 

Admittedly, there are trappings of unfairness in comparing the 1-5 series - an undertaking first completed when CSH had just finished school - with Teens of Denial's crisper, more technically polished sound (switchboards have been known to work wonders and just try to decipher the former's vocals without the aid of Genius, I double dare you). But in the years that separated the projects, it's nigh-on-impossible to ignore the leaps and bounds Toledo's songwriting had improved since those days. The freewheeling, overly-poetic prose - at least partly inspired by one of Toledo's musical heroes, Michael Stipe - that ran throughout My Back is Killing Me Baby or Twin Fantasy would turn into something a little more profound, a little more immersive, and a little more disgusted with itself and the young Epicureans encapsulated within it. "Not What I Needed" evidences these talents with prismatic dimensions, where Toledo imagines the whole indie rock subculture as a cult complete with hierarchies, disillusioned peoples and false promises ('your soul is just like ours'.) It's a brazen move to scoff at the scene that holds the keys to your success, but it's this same iconoclasm that makes Toledo so brilliant here: the boldness to chip away at your own foundations at the risk of coming down with it. If you were an artist as prolific as Toledo, you might learn these skills over time. What you'll never pick up, however, is their littérateur Steven Wright-esque delivery, the ability to make a Dido reference sound as bookish as Moby Dick. 

Sure, having been an English-major has its perks when crafting dynamic songwriting as novelistic as this. Particularly when one can so seamlessly switch from “Fill in the Blank”’s diaristic emptiness to the witness-box accounting of “Joe Gets Kicked Out of School”. But it’s Toledo’s penchant for penning those several-minute exuberant rock-opera tracks that flex their deftness in narrative construction and their command of the sounds encapsulated around it. Just visit “Connect the Dots (The Saga of Frank Sinatra)” and stare mouth agape at how Toledo, with all his thematic heel turns and sudden changes in delivery, produces a song that could be 6 minutes or 60 minutes long - it doesn’t really matter; we’re hooked either way. Watch how the frontman hides in the undergrowth of these pockets of reverb-filled anticipation, only to jut out of it and fire birdshot filled with Greek gods in heaven playing who’s who with “Nathan” and “Chrissy” and the “other Nathan”. From here, you might feel safe; you might even feel your grip unclutch from the armrest. But then it starts up again: ironic “whooos” and “ahhhs” that congeal in size and bravado until collapsing into the most exuberant riff offset with the defeatism - ‘we're never gonna get a job’. By this point, our nerves are desperate for the closer. 

Kids become adults and then begin the long, arduous process of becoming kids again. The horrors of your 20s knock on your door, kick you in the balls and leave you on the floor, wondering whether you should dust yourself off or just assume the fetal position. It's all an incessant, ceaseless change and unlike Toledo, we may never possess the ability to rearticulate it all in the sobriety of hindsight. But the splendour of Teens of Denial is its stasis: its ability to suspend your youth from the rafters and prod at all those chemicals and feelings and bagatelle bullshit which make us the grown-ups we were never meant to be but are anyway. You might not find hope whilst gazing at it, but if you feel fear lightly coated in shame, just know you're doing it right.