Car Seat Headrest's Teens of Denial, released yesterday on Matador Records, sounds like 2002. To these ears at least, it brings to mind the debut album from turn-of-the-century alternative hero Ben Kweller (Sha, Sha). While being perfect soundtracks for a windows-down spring drive, these records also make you think. Thoughtful yet obtuse lyrics cause you to ponder a track long after it ends, and the compositions seem to offer new musical ideas every listen as they eschew typical song formats and instrumentations.

But Teens of Denial couldn't possibly exist 15 years ago—least of all because songwriter Will Toledo hadn't yet turned 10 years old. Toledo instead stands as a "new" voice among a younger generation of musicians (ala Chance The Rapper, age 23, or Torres, age 25) who grew up alongside our current digital music ecosystem. As such, Car Seat Headrest's first original album for a label represents a culmination of many changes the industry has gone through in the past decade-plus: instant accessibility to vast catalogues; the democratization of recording and releasing; the need to share it all immediately.

And if Teens of Denial stands as a sign of the times, things have turned out all right for us fans.

Toledo will turn 24 this fall. To put that into music history perspective, his entire creative existence comes in the post-Napster era. Napster cofounder Sean Parker changed the industry forever in 1999, and ripples from that revolution continue to play out in the streaming wars and ever-evolving revenue models for musicians.

This may explain Car Seat Headrest's wide-reaching sound. While critics often use "sounds like" comparisons as a crutch, here they illustrate the variety displayed on Teens of Denial. Within the last six months, Pitchfork compared the music of Car Seat Headrest to Guided By Voices (alternative sensibilities), Belle and Sebastian (emotional directness), Yo La Tengo (engaging jamming), Stephen Malkmus (poetic wordiness), and Joanna Newsom/Bright Eyes/Okkervil River (combining many of those other things). NPR referenced Neutral Milk Hotel (album-wide depth of thought) and Television (iconic guitar lines). The New Yorker thinks Toledo's work has echoes of Wolf Parade, Xiu Xiu, Brian Wilson, and Leonard Cohen.

In the decades before the digital music revolution, parents, siblings, and friends needed to have that breadth of music available for you to experience it Blindly fishing at the record store didn't make financial sense, and radio stations couldn't provide the vast and thorough exposure of today's Internet. But throughout his formative years, Toledo has been able to instantly hear seemingly anything he wanted to explore. Whether he would namecheck all the bands above or not, he certainly belongs to a generation with more opportunities to be influenced by a wider range of music than ever before. (Naturally, Toledo made his own playlist of inspirations for the new album.)

But being able to listen to music does not necessarily translate to making music. Toledo possesses obvious songwriting gifts, but here he also fell into the right era. "I started from a young age just recording stuff onto computers using the basic software the computer came with," he told Ars. At first, he toyed with well-known audio freeware Audacity (created in 1999), eventually moving onto GarageBand (made in 2004) and landing on Logic ("which is like the more expensive version of GarageBand," Toledo joked). Debates over the quality of these programs compared to old four-track hardware fill Pitchfork features, but they unquestionably allow someone like Toledo to flesh out his ideas and experiment in a previously unthinkable way.

Experiment he did. Toledo's songwriting process may have more in common with a novelist than a 19th-century composer: blank pages represent death, first drafts can be perfected. Using only his Macbook, its built-in microphone, and a USB interface for his guitar, Toledo started by digitizing as many of his ideas as necessary. (His moniker-now-band name comes from how he'd record vocals by driving his parents' minivan to empty parking lots to sing into the computer.) These snippets soon took on new life as Toledo meticulously tinkered in his audio software to build what he heard in his head.

"I tried to approximate, roughly, what I was hearing on LPs I was listening to and then fill stuff out in the studio—well, not in a studio, but in the computer," he said. "I was experimenting to see if I could achieve the sounds I heard on various records: double tracking the vocals, building full band arrangements with drums but doing it myself. When you do those things, it has to be arranged 80 to 90 percent on the computer. So anytime I was working on a song, it mainly meant I was working on the computer."

Perhaps equally as important as making the music, Toledo always had a home for it. His first release (called 1) dates back to spring 2010, and it still lives on Bandcamp (which itself dates back to 2007). And while some of the above applies to other young artists relying on today's digital reality, few if any musicians leverage the current access to distribution and immediacy as well as Toledo.

At the age of 23, Toledo already has 11 albums and an EP to his name on the Car Seat Headrest Bandcamp page (Teens of Denial will make it an even dozen). And while he released a few songs one-by-one back in the days of 1 and the corresponding 2, Toledo soon settled on the album as his preferred unit. "I didn’t do it again because the problem is people who download when it’s half-done have to get it again once the tracklist is finished. It was a little mean of me to do it that way," he said. "So I kind of grew up using Bandcamp because that was the only site that offered the album format for sharing digital files. Everything else I can think of was song-based, like SoundCloud, or it was iTunes, which was difficult to get your music up through a lengthy submission process. I was always making stuff, but Bandcamp was how I was able to share that online. That opened some doors."

Toledo's first release for Matador, last year's Teens of Style, didn't include a single new song. Instead, the label wanted Car Seat Headrest partially because of this built-up history. Teens of Style essentially acts as a best-of for Toledo's Bandcamp output, although the musician re-recorded each selected track. This highlights perhaps the most modern characteristic of Car Seat Headrest: any song can be a continuous work in progress.

"I continued to utilize Bandcamp's fluidity," as Toledo put it. But in simpler terms, any Car Seat Headrest album—even after officially publishing—remains ripe for revisiting. My Back is Killing Me Baby started life as 5, and Toledo re-sequenced the entire thing when changing the album name. In fact, My Back Is Killing Me Baby actually combines 5 with another EP called Sunburned Shirts ("I went back, combined them, and removed my least favorite tracks to make everything into one LP," Toledo said). He posted another album called Twin Fantasy in 2011. In 2012, he remixed the entire thing before swapping out the old version from Bandcamp.

Wait, the album is good, right? Would Car Seat Headrest represent any deeper meanings about modern music if Teens of Denial felt stale, formulaic, or pedestrian? Maybe, but we certainly wouldn't write about it. This album plain rocks. No, it complexly rocks. Toledo can craft four-minute pop (" Would Car Seat Headrest represent any deeper meanings about modern music if Teens of Denial felt stale, formulaic, or pedestrian? Maybe, but we certainly wouldn't write about it. This album plain rocks. No, it complexly rocks. Toledo can craft four-minute pop (" Fill in the Blank ") and a near-10-minute structurally shifting epic ( "Vincent," album version) with the same level of expertise. Surprises await you each listen, but don't expect the catchiest phrases to leave your head quickly. Thankfully, the album's ideas are equal to the music. Toledo has listeners singing along about police brutality, depression, digital dependence, humanity's flaws, self-doubt, sexual identity—stuff I probably wasn't sure of, maybe not even aware of, at his age. (Toledo's unflinchingly honest wordplay would've made great AIM away-message fodder; ironic given the service's peak likely preceded him.) A personal favorite focuses on cultural tourism as the guitars increasingly embrace a little feedback: "For the past year, I've been living in a town that gets a lot of tourists in the summer months / they come and they stay for a couple of days, but hey, I'm living here every day." Teens of Denial has serious replay value. Even better, the album will introduce many to the rare "new" artist who already has a deep back catalog instead of making you wait for a sophomore LP.

Over the years, Toledo has kept a consistent presence on Tumblr (a service that coincidentally started the same year as Bandcamp). He posts plenty of ideas and early demos, including a recent Radiohead tribute. This transparency and symbiotic interaction with fans became part of his process. So whenever Toledo made the types of sweeping changes that services like iTunes might demonize, "people commented, but now people don’t really remember that was a thing."

You may have heard about someone else trying a similar approach earlier this year. Kanye West released his Tidal faux-exclusive The Life of Pablo on February 14, tweaked some tracks in mid-March, and then shocked fans by producing an almost entirely new version on March 31. West now calls the album "a living breathing changing creative expression" and promises that more updates are coming. Outlets like USA Today instead used the term "messy."

As for Toledo, he sees an exciting new reality—one he's intimately familiar with—playing out with his industry's biggest star. "What Kanye is doing is a lot more recognizable to younger people who are more used to this sort of low-key LP release," he said. "Even with official LPs, people get leaks and half-finished versions before the album actually drops, and this only became prevalent with the Internet. People today are used to the having the LP come into shape more slowly and not get dropped all at once, so what Kanye did was brilliant. He got so much shit for it being a disastrous release or whatever, but that’s not what I saw. He understood the power of the Internet, and he was using his massive celebrity to use Tidal like it was the next Bandcamp."

Which takes us back to Teens of Denial. Toledo's penchant for editing and re-editing, his comfort with pre-release transparency and post-release flexibility... it's largely on hold for now. The upcoming album contains new songs written expressly for the occasion, so any sneak previews had to be managed. Toledo also worked with a producer for the first time, meaning more real instruments instead of trackpads and wavelengths.

"Teens of Denial was a 180 for me with the working process," he said. "I was used to fiddling with stuff on the CPU, the producer was used to fiddling in the studio. So when the time came to work on the CPU, we had to find a way to work together so we weren't just doing and undoing each other’s work. As a result, this LP is much less fucked with in post and more straightforward rock."

And the most noticeable change: Teens of Denial stands as the rare finished Car Seat Headrest product. Toledo doesn't plan on revisiting it beyond the usual tweaks any artist may make when performing live. For now at least, he'll exist as the traditional musician of any era that tours behind a new release. But down the line, Car Seat Headrest can't help but operate within the world as Toledo knows it.

"I hope it [revisiting albums] becomes the norm. There’s an artificiality to the idea of an album release and on that day the music goes from non-existing to full completed," he said. "It’s always evolving, and it’s always been that way. Before recorded music, songs constantly changed because they were live, and the recording process can be the same way. Plus, if you’re young and want to be a musician, it’s more engaging to see that process at work. For now I’m in the official label mode so no spoilers, but hopefully I’ll get back to a point where I can freely share demos and musical thoughts."