Self-described "nervous young man" Will Toledo started recording music in his bedroom as a teenager.

First, he would lay down a bed of raw electric guitars and lo-fi synths via the crappy built-in mic on his computer.

Then he would drive the family station-wagon to sparsely populated car parks around Williamsburg, Virginia, climb into the back seat, and record the vocals onto his laptop.



"My room at home had real thin walls and not much privacy," he tells me from that very same house. Now 24, Toledo lives in Seattle these days, but he's at home on holiday when I call, visiting his parents.

Will Toledo of Car Seat Headrest: "I recorded those early albums in the back seat in car parks."

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"So I would drive to the far corners of big parking lots outside stores people didn't attend very often, or church parking lots on days when there were no services."



In part, it was peace and privacy he was after, but Toledo also wanted to prove that great records could be made anywhere.



"You get engineers and producers talking lovingly about the acoustics of certain studios, but I always felt like the location of a recording had no effect whatsoever on its quality. It's more about the people making the music, so I'd place myself in these environments no one else would use, and record songs into my laptop in the back seat."



Great songs, as it happens. Insightful, funny, invariably angsty and occasionally wise, with both lyrics and backing tracks stuffed with cunning references to bands he loved: REM, Pavement, Jandek, Nirvana, The Who, Radiohead, Swans.

The audience, for his early songmaking sessions? Just those empty station-wagon seats, their headrests jutting up like listening heads. Hence Toledo's heroically mundane band name, Car Seat Headrest.

Will Toledo (left), now fronting a full band.

And as a bookish teenager with a vivid imagination and turbulent emotional life, there was no shortage of source material for songs; Toledo self-released 11 albums online via Bandcamp in just four years.

"I wanted to make records people could latch onto at a deeper level than most of the music I see being made these days," he tells me in a slow monotone.

"All the records I grew up on had already lasted decades before I even discovered them – people like The Beatles, The Who and later, Pink Floyd. Between those three bands somewhere were planted the seeds of my own songwriting abilities, and I still listen to all those bands regularly now. That music has really held up over time, so it made sense for me to try and make songs like that, too. And people have really responded to that."



Indeed. Over the last year or so, Toledo has been anointed as nothing less than the newly risen lord and saviour of indie guitar music. "The voice of a generation that doesn't want a voice" reckoned online mag The Brag, while Popmatters called him "indie rock's next great hope". Not to be outdone, Consequence of Sound proclaimed Toledo "The Indie Rock Hero We've Been Waiting For".



After releasing two albums on major American independent label Matador, his previous cult following has blossomed into a substantial global audience. Toledo now fronts a band rather than recording solo, and is one of the chief drawcards for Auckland's upcoming Laneway Festival, taking place at Albert Street Precinct on January 30.



It's hard to tell how he feels about his burgeoning fame. Though his songs are often strafed with wit, Toledo is your archetypal "Serious Young Man" in person, with little perceptible sense of humour. He speaks about his work with neither warmth nor hostility: a gifted introvert who suddenly finds himself squirming slightly under the spotlight, being interrogated about his life and music and then, often as not, misrepresented.

Chona Katsinger Will Toledo a.k.a. Car Seat Headrest: clean cut indie hero?

"I haven't been very impressed with most articles in the high-profile outlets. I've gone into every interview with the mindset that I'll say thoughtful and original things and put my heart into describing what I do, but when the story comes out, I can barely recognise myself in the final article. The author clearly had their own agenda, then just chose a few of my quotes to illustrate that. I've become a little disillusioned with the whole process."

So, what are all these highly complimentary stories – which appear everywhere from free fanzines and bleeding edge blogs to The Guardian and the New York Times – leaving out, or misrepresenting?

"Really, the problem is more a tone they adopt. For one thing, that whole 'indie rock hero' thing; I don't even think about my music as indie rock, really. It's kind of unflattering, and undersells the amount of effort I put into my songs. Indie rock nowadays is a more gentle blend of things that were going on in the 90s, whereas I'm trying to make music that's vital and surprising, without any sort of glib genre name."



Vital and surprising. You could find no better descriptors for Toledo's most recent album, Teens Of Denial, which was the best guitar record I heard last year.



The maker might be aloof and measured in person, but this record is anything but, with brash lyrical couplets bolted to guitar music that's vivid, muscular, ambitious, unpredictable.



It's easy to hear what all the fuss is about. Toledo might reckon proper studios add little to a recording, but he used one this time around, and a producer, too: Steve Fisk, who previously worked with Nirvana, Soundgarden, Mudhoney and many more

Will Toledo: "I’m happier now that I was when I was writing this record.”

Result? More focus, fizz and power. Here we have the same themes Toledo wrestled with on his earlier self-recorded albums- loneliness, anxiety, information overload, drugs, God, other people's pop songs – strapped onto leaner, punchier backing tracks.

The line between comedy and tragedy is blurred on many songs. One song sees Jesus turning up to chastise Toledo while he's tripping on psychedelic drugs at a friend's house.

Another song finds our narrator disappointed that he "did not transcend" after taking acid and magic mushrooms, instead spending much of his time preoccupied by the fact that he's wearing such a hideously unbecoming jacket.

The break-up ballad Cosmic Hero extracts pleasure from the notion that Toledo will eventually find solace in the afterlife, while his ex will not: "I will go to Heaven/ I won't see you there!".

And 11 minute album centrepiece Ballad of the Costa Concordia considers human inadequacy from an unexpected angle, with Toledo comparing assorted minor adolescent irritations –losing a job, canning off his pushbike, forgetting his backpack at a basketball game – with the plight of the cowardly captain who jumped into the lifeboat early after running his cruise liner aground off the Italian coast in 2012, a disaster that killed 32 people.

"I wasn't intending that songs to be a joke, actually," he protests. "But I can see how people might read it that way. But you're right about my own emotional life supplying a lot of material. I feel like over the next few years I'll be dealing with enough stuff to keep me in meaningful content. And in a way, writing and recording are a retreat from the other parts of my life which are more anxiety provoking. Writing and recording are more introspective and sometimes solitary processes than touring or talking about your music, and they're the parts of making music I like most."

Teens Of Denial is a record that seems to both condense and amplify what it means to be young, smart and disaffected in modern America. Toledo wrestles with his own ego throughout, switching between flashes of arrogance and deep insecurity, bemusement and despair.

There's a real feeling of tension throughout, between taut, anthemic instrumental arrangements and the vulnerability of Toledo's lyrics. And the singer's delivery seals the deal.

On songs such as Hippie Power, Toledo's voice is a marvel to behold, the tone swooping up from a jaded baritone to wild, cracking yelps that recall Pavement's Steve Malkmus at his most unhinged.

"I feel like an influence of bands like Nirvana and Green Day comes through there, maybe," says Toledo with an audible shrug. "Especially Kurt Cobain. I was always trying to match his screams in high school. I guess I like rock music like that that wears its emotions on its sleeve."

Toledo's early records largely explored the loneliness and confusion of being a teenager. Teens Of Denial, meanwhile, was written and recorded during his early 20s, in those transitional years after leaving university. One writer ventured the opinion that the album's prevailing theme was "the anticlimax of adulthood".

"Yeah, I guess that's true. When I came out of my teen years, I found that nothing particularly new or better was waiting for me, and I was pretty frustrated about that. I couldn't see a really satisfying path for myself into adulthood. But since then, I've made some steps towards finding that. I still have good and bad times, ebbs and peaks, but I'm happier now that I was when I was writing this record."

One reason for the current "Cult of Car Seat" is surely nostalgia, given that his music is so reminiscent of other extraordinary bands who've been flag-bearers for the Matador label in the past.

One critic defined Toledo's musical style as a sort of "every Matador band in a blender sound", noting strands of recombined DNA from Yo La Tengo, Belle and Sebastian, Pavement/ Steve Malkmus and Guided By Voices, among others. This was intended as high praise, but Toledo doesn't take it that way.

"I have to hope that similarity's just a phase, I guess, and make stuff that sounds more like my own original content. But yeah, you can hear my influences in there, for sure. Really, what I hope people come away with when they listen to these tunes is some sort of emotional catharsis, and some of those other bands you mention really did that for people. There's a lot of emotional sustenance to be found in certain records that become important to you. I would listen to those records over and over and feel better about myself. That's what good records have done for me, and I can only hope I'm now making those sorts of records for other people, too."

Will Toledo/ Car Seat Headrest play Auckland's Laneway Festival on Monday Jan 30 at Albert Park Precinct. For more information, see auckland.lanewayfestival.com/