By Bernard Zuel
Hearing Car Seat Headrest for the first time right now is akin to turning up late to a party and realising that everyone has been hitting the sauce for hours, knows everyone else and if you want to join in you better get cracking.
Teens Of Denial, the hook-filled 2016 album from the group built around singer/songwriter Will Toledo, was the second in about six months released on the smart indie label Matador.
Car Seat Headrest on Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show.Credit: Andrew Lipovsky
It's sharp and funny, buzzing with guitars and energy, sometimes short and rapid like heroes of his, the Descendents, other times long and experimental like a classic mind-bending psychedelic band.
And all with a patina of languor that the lazy would call "slacker" but which is really a kind of safe distancing from lyrics that seemed all too direct and personal.
Will Toledo of Carseat Head Rest: "A lot of my creativity is of a solitary nature."Credit: Anna Webber
Many people fell in love with Teens Of Denial, and the 24-year-old Toledo, only to discover that he had already released 11 albums – yes, that's one more than 10, not some fancy way of writing two – online on Bandcamp, before Matador came calling.
This might be intimidating: where do you start? Is it too late? Or it could be exciting: such a treasure trove waiting for you!
"I would hope it's not too overwhelming for people," says the intense but simultaneously nonchalant Toledo, who recommends working backwards so that by the time you get to the raw, early material he recorded in his bedroom and in his car late at night in a distant car park, you have acclimatised.
Most he made on his own – despite having a pianist father he has never learnt notation, but he has mastered several instruments. More recently he's had a two-piece then a four-piece band. Still, in six years Toledo has released more albums than Radiohead have made 20 years plus.
Focusing on the scale obscures a more relevant question. Given how cheap and easy it is to do now, even as a teenager in Virginia with a basic computer, why don't more people do just that when the fever of songwriting is at its peak?
"I was lucky in that while I was inducing this high level of output I was in college, didn't have a job, was taking not-very-demanding classes and had a good amount of free time on my hands," Toledo says. "But once you are a musician in the industry it gets harder to have that high output."
Indeed. Since signing to Matador, moving to Seattle and being confronted by waves of interviews, gigs and invitations to tour, Toledo has been noticeably slack by his standards. One record as a compilation of earlier recordings and one new record, in a few months? Who does he think he is, U2?
"I've been trying to record and mix whenever I'm home but it's just that I'm at home a lot less these days," he says with some resignation. "Life would be kind of empty without [writing and recording]."
Man, or songwriter, can't live on bedroom recordings and shouting into a microphone in a Target car park alone. Actually making money, albeit not exactly Kanye money, doesn't hurt, even if like Toledo you're happy crashing on a friend's couch rather than looking for a house of your own.
"That's why I need to alternate between touring and recording. I'm fairly introverted and that means a lot of my creativity is of a solitary nature. I need space to be alone to think about my art. But you can't make art without being interactive with the world," he says.
So here's the rub. Has more interaction with the world, especially one so enamoured of him that it is poring over the details of his life as represented in his songs, changed the art or the artist?
"Yeah, I'm reacting to it. Before, there was a slowly developing fan base and as that happens there's an interest in the person behind the work. There was a time when I kind of got fed up with that aspect of it," he says, adding that at least it prepared him.
"Before, there was a lot more confessional stuff about my life, and I moved past that partly because of the public eye but partly moving into a writerly sphere where it doesn't have to be personal. I am trying to frame everything in an artistic manner and keeping my identity and my sanity that way."
Oxford Art Factory, Sydney, January 25; Curtin Bandroom, Melbourne, January 27; Laneway Festival, Melbourne, January 28 and Sydney, February 4.