- If those with immense musical talent didn’t make the rest of us feel bad enough, it's people like Will Toledo who finish the job. Since self-releasing to bandcamp from the backseat of his family car in 2010, the brain behind Car Seat Headrest lists eleven albums and a retrospective compilation to his name. A quick run through the twenty-three-year-old’s experimental bedroom rock back-catalog will clock in at around twelve hours. Only then do we get to Teens of Denial.

To produce so much, so fast, at such an age, screams confidence. Generally, the only thing standing in the way of doing anything in a DIY digital era is the desire to do so. Something which has evidently never hindered Toledo, though it’s the inverse of this confidence found on the anthemic opener Fill in the Blank. “You have no right to be depressed / You haven’t tried hard enough in life yet”, Toledo scolds himself in the stop-start chorus before an indecisive inner-voice muscles in to contradict everything he’s said.

Where 2015’s Teens of Style blew dust from the archives, Teens of Denial is over an hour of new material. Given Toledo’s track record this is unsurprising. Never one to shy away from longer tracks, flourishes on Vincent—featuring an extended intro reminiscent of The Who—and the epic Ballad of Costa Concordia, don’t descend into extravagance. The release feels full without bulging. Expansive without intimidating.

It’s smart, self-aware songwriting that drives Car Seat Headrest. Something that becomes more apparent given the jump from bedroom to recording studio, where songs no longer sink behind the simplified lo-fi label so crudely applied to them. Toledo cites the lyricism of Kendrick Lamar—the dry vernacular of Courtney Barnett is here too. His sharp wit pairs well with the sharpened sound and side-steps any threat of revealing a hollow shell. What does show up is a wealth of influence that, according to Toledo, stretches from bands like The Cars to Green Day and back again, sounding a little like if The Strokes had grown up on the internet.

Teens of Denial emerges as a mature release from somebody who has long proven maturity beyond their age. If Toledo was at all in denial about being an adult, this record all but proves he is.

- Matt Dennien.