Car Seat Headrest Rework Teens Of Denial For Its 10th Anniversary, Sparking Fan Backlash

Ten years ago today, Car Seat Headrest released Teens Of Denial, one of the landmark indie rock albums of the 2010s. As is his wont, CSH leader Will Toledo has taken this anniversary as an opportunity to record a new alternate version of the album titled Teen Of Denial: Joe's Story. This choice has proven controversial. But before we get into all that, let's take a moment to remember why the original album was such a big deal.

Produced by Pacific Northwest legend Steve Fisk, Teens Of Denial was Car Seat Headrest's first collection of new material for indie standard bearer Matador Records after a prolific string of self-released albums that made Toledo one of the most cultishly beloved fixtures of the early Bandcamp era. The record won over a lot of us who never connected with Toledo's earlier work, including our own Tom Breihan, who called it "everything great about indie rock collected into one album" in his Album Of The Week review. He continued:

For one thing, it rocks. The mix is ragged and sloppy, but it's also hard and immediate. Frenzied, in-the-red, almost Pinkerton-sounding guitar solos erupt out of nothingness every so often. Toledo is allergic to traditional song forms; when he returns to a chorus more than a couple of times, it feels almost like an accident. But he knows how to riff, both on the guitar and vocally, and the way he and his bandmates toss around the title on "Unforgiving Girl (She's Not An)" like a hackeysack, it ends up working better than an actual chorus. Toledo is one of these lyricists, like Courtney Barnett or John Darnielle or Separation Sunday-era Craig Finn, who are too sharp and wide-ranging and free-associative to fit what they're doing into conventionally structured songs. And so Teens Of Denial comes out as a sprawling concept album about what it's like to be young and empty.

Tom was honing in on what Teens Of Denial so special. The album somehow functions as both an accessible down-the-middle guitar-based rock record about relatable quarter-life ennui and a tangled, twisty, sprawling-everywhere odyssey through unconventional songcraft and weird neuroses. There are tons of lyrical details to parse, but massive sing-along choruses abound too. Toledo described it as a bildungsroman sparked by a phase when he wasn't feeling loved, which led to a portrait of disaffection the likes of which tend to imprint themselves on young listeners for life.

Teens Of Denial turned Car Seat Headrest into an indie-rock household name, and it still holds up today. Casuals and zealots alike can appreciate this project. From a listener standpoint, there was no need to fix "Wolves," as it were. But one of Toledo's great passions is creating variations on his own work. This is the guy who famously remade 2011 cult classic Twin Fantasy seven years later, then put out multiple editions of 2020's underrated Making A Door Less Open. So it is somehow both shocking and unsurprising that he decided to update this body of work as well.

For Teen Of Denial: Joe's Story, out today, Toledo went back and developed a more intensive backstory about Joe, his avatar in the Teens Of Denial narrative. He and the rest of Car Seat Headrest then re-recorded the album with Fisk, changing lyrics and arrangements and adding new songs including "Optimistic Son" and "Joe Drives Again." Late-album epic "The Ballad Of The Costa Concordia" has been renamed "The Ravenous House," and "Unforgiving Girl (She's Not An)" has been removed. Here's how Toledo explained this course of action:

Sometime last year, it was suggested to me that we do something for the ten-year anniversary of ‘Teens of Denial,’ so I started looking back on the album to see what we might do. In spite of some of its songs being a regular part of my life for the past decade, it wasn’t a record I’d thought much about as a whole since it came out. Most of the songs I’d come up with over a two-year period at the end of my college days, when I was struggling a lot with cynicism and misplaced aggression. But by the time the songs were done, I was living in Washington, Car Seat Headrest was a full band with a record label, and in spite of the turmoil of the writing process, the final album was pretty enjoyable for everyone to work on.

This time, looking back at the songs, I started to feel like there was a story being told through the album, though I’d never imagined it as being a narrative work. On ‘Hi, How Are You?’ Daniel Johnston had used the name “Joe” in the titles of a few tracks –“No More Pushing Joe Around,” “Keep Punching Joe” – as a sort of joke, a stand-in for himself. I borrowed the idea, and the name, for titling songs on ‘Denial.’ This time, I started thinking - who is Joe? And how do the songs, in the way they’re sequenced on the album, reflect what he’s going through? As I started asking this question, a story emerged with startling wholeness and clarity, like finding the foundations of an ancient city while digging in my backyard. As I kept digging, certain songs from the original album fell by the wayside, as they seemed misplaced in this new context; others asked for new lyrics, to fully give birth to the story contained in the music.

The resulting work feels more like the album ‘Teens of Denial’ was meant to be. When you’re writing from a dark space, it’s hard to have perspective on where you’re at. This time, I could pull from memories of that darkness, and use the distance and additional perspective of ten years of life to shed a fuller light on the experience. Joe is a character going through some of what I experienced, and some of his own problems. Telling his story, and not just my own impressions of life at the end of the teen years, brought a new level of compassion and wholeness to the album. It gave us the opportunity to write new material in “Denial style”, embracing a snappy and simple(ish) rock aesthetic, and in an additional blessing, we were able to team up once with Steve Fisk, a joy and inspiration to get back into the studio with after ten years. We mixed the material at his house in Tacoma, and were constantly amazed at the lack of divide between past and present, as we’d punch in vocal overdubs ten years later into the same gear, hearing my voice now running alongside a 2015 Will. For someone coming across this album or this band for the first time, this is how they’d hear the record, not as a relic of the past but as a new piece. It was immensely rewarding to experience that on our side.

For anyone familiar with ‘Teens,’ comparisons with the original will be inevitable, but I do hope that as much as possible, people can come to this album on its own terms, approaching it as a teen, hearing the music and story for the first time. I believe music is an ongoing story, and albums don’t always do justice to its dynamic, ongoing nature. What gives it life is the new ears that hear it, and the new hearts that engage with it. I’m so grateful that this is a work that people have kept coming to, and I hope that this presentation does them honor with a fresh offering to the conversation. We’ve known that “it doesn’t have to be like this”; now we can wonder - “what it if were like this?”

That's all well and good in theory, but some fans who received the album early have been ruffled by the changes. For one thing, all the cursing has been removed. On "(Joe Gets Kicked Out of School For Using) Drugs With Friends (But Says This Isn’t a Problem)," for instance, Toledo used to sing, "Last Friday, I took acid and mushrooms/ I did not transcend, I felt like a walking piece of shit/ In a stupid looking jacket." On the new recording, he sings, "I felt like a dying alien."

This was one of many changes derided in the Car Seat Headrest subreddit, where fans are airing their grievances about the re-record. In a now-deleted post on Bluesky, bandmate Andrew Katz attributed the swearing removal to Toledo's "deep-dive into his religion." Katz continued, "He was in a different place than he was 10 years ago when re-recording ToD, and he's in a different place even now compared to when we did the re-records."

This vague disclosure about Toledo's religious interests has concerned some of the band's queer fan base, many of whom gravitated toward Car Seat Headrest in part due to Toledo navigating his own queer sexuality in his songs. In a message from a Discord server that has been posted onto Twitter, a representative for Toledo passed along a message from the singer: "when I was making this my only concern was making something for people who had never encountered the album and were hearing it for the first time, I didn't make it for anyone who already knows the album." The intermediary also mentioned that Toledo took out the profanity in part so that the album could be checked out from libraries, though I'm not sure how many public libraries out there are refusing to lend albums with cuss words.

After Toledo's message arrived, another band member, Ethan Ives, posted a lengthy message on his Instagram story asserting that "I am not, will never be, a christian." Here's the full text:

Apropos of nothing I feel obliged to make it official to any in the general public who may be listening that I am not, will never be, a christian. I can't support any monotheistic framework and am politically allergic to the whole business.

I say this only because it would be a worst-case outcome for me if anyone who was queer, trans, a woman, or person of color felt that music made on my watch was, politically, "not for them." I would consider this antithetical to the base intent of rock music. Particularly in light of a creeping conservatism and religiosity not just in society at large, but in the alt/indie spheres as the music A shifts ever further from its working-class builders and towards ivy league yuppies and trust fund kids. If you aren't either of those things, I want you feeling not just safe but strengthened by | anything affiliated with me.

Just so you know where I'm at. live long and prosper ?

It's not fully clear what's going on here, but here's what we do know: Teen Of Denial: Joe's Story is out now, and Katz says Car Seat Headrest are working on a completely new album too. Depending on how you feel about last year's The Scholars, maybe that's great news, or maybe you'd prefer to live in your memories of the old CSH. Hear Joe's Story below.