Will Toledo isn’t interested in doing the same thing twice. Making a Door Less Open, the 2020 Car Seat Headrest record, arrived as his strangest yet—depending on which copy you bought. “If you’re listening on vinyl, CD, or streaming, you’re going to hear a different album,” he explained. “We just worked up to each deadline trying to get the best thing for that format.”
Toledo bristles at the idea that vinyl should just be an afterthought. “It bothers me when I see a record on vinyl that was clearly not structured for it. You end up with two slabs of vinyl for something under an hour, and it’s silly. If we’re selling vinyl, I want it to reflect vinyl. Same with CDs. It’s a different experience. Sometimes you turn the car on and the album starts in the middle, and you live with it. That shapes the tracklist, whether you realize it or not.”
There are collectors who’d call this a marketing ploy, but Toledo shrugs. “We included everything as a download. If you want all the versions, you don’t have to buy three copies. For me, it was about the record reflecting the process. If it’s still evolving, let it be shown on the record itself.”
That process included sampling—not the hip-hop kind with uncleared Marvin Gaye hooks, but the scavenger hunt kind. “If we needed a snare sound, we’d look for samples. A lot of it was pre-recorded elements chopped up and built into something new. There’s a trumpet solo on ‘Martin’ from a sample library. But I didn’t want songs that were only samples. I wanted them to work if you just picked up a guitar and played. That’s what I meant by folk music—they should translate.”
Which brings us to Trait, Toledo’s alter ego for the album, complete with gas mask and flashing LED eyes. “It was helpful to have Trait in my mind for some of these tracks,” he said. “I pushed myself vocally—faster lyrics, more lines per minute. Having another identity gave me permission to do that.”
Trait was supposed to be a live presence, a mask for the bigger stages the band had graduated to. “It’s weird going into a theater and pretending it’s still a rock club,” Toledo said. “We have flashy lights now. It makes more sense to lean into that, to build a show that uses those resources. Theatrics feel like a lost art in rock music. I miss that.”
The record’s radio single, “Hollywood,” drips with exactly that sense of melodramatic theater. Toledo calls it a slow pan up the class ladder, watching everyone screw over the rung below. “It’s not really about Hollywood, it’s about being an ordinary person bombarded with these news flashes you can’t make sense of. At the top of pop culture, material success isn’t being questioned at all. And yet here we are, talking about the failures of capitalism. That disconnect is weird to me.”
There’s tongue-in-cheek humor in “Hollywood,” but it isn’t satire for satire’s sake. “I wanted to write lyrics that played to my voice, which tends toward the dramatic,” Toledo said. “Something weird, off-kilter, but engaging. Onstage, I can lean into that. There’s a performative element that edges on comic but never quite gets there. It stays in this strange melodramatic range.”
Futurism also found its way into the mix—not Silicon Valley futurism, but early 20th-century Italian futurism, the art movement obsessed with noise and speed. “I liked translating that into music,” he said. “The futurists were making abrasive avant-garde art because they were surrounded by noise. Same today—cities are saturated with sound. Leaf blowers, carpet cleaner trucks—I recorded them and put them in the record. It’s about turning that nonsensical landscape into something musical.”
As for what happens with Trait, Toledo still isn’t sure. “It remains to be seen what being Trait looks like. It was supposed to be part of a live concert, and that hasn’t happened yet. But anything’s possible—videos, maybe a film. You don’t need that context to enjoy the music, but if you pay attention, there’s a lot you can do with a mysterious character.”
For now, the record stands on its own—a noisy, fractured, theatrical puzzle that changes depending on how you play it. Dylan did it with endless bootlegs; Trent Reznor did it with flash drives in bathroom stalls. Toledo just made three albums at once and called it one.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
