If you cranked out 11 homemade albums in just four years, you’d probably want to go big once you had the means to make a for-real long-player for a noted indie label. And though 2016’sTeens of Denialisn’tCar Seat Headrest‘s first album for Matador Records, this is the first one founder, frontman, and songwriterWill Toledobuilt from the ground up for the label. Arriving in 2015,Teens of Stylewas a re-recorded “best-of” that revisitedToledo‘s earlier material, butTeens of Denialis a grand-scale 70-minute song cycle about a kid named Joe who is wrestling with the traditional dilemmas of late adolescence and early adulthood. Unlike the lion’s share ofToledo‘s work,Teens of Denialwas recorded in a professional studio with a real producer (Steve Fisk) and a band (withEthan Iveson bass andAndrew Katzon drums).Teens of Denialdoesn’t sound especially slick (quite the opposite), but it feels big and ambitious;Toledohas a story to tell, and if his vocals are often laconic, they fit the material well, as he re-creates the casual eloquence of a high schooler’s mumble and shrug.Teens of Denialis that rarity, an album about teenage life that sounds like it could have been created by a 17-year-old, though few would have the intelligence and discipline to get their ideas on tape with this level of skill.Toledounderstands that the circumstances of Joe’s life might sometimes seem trivial at first glance, but the emotions behind them, and the lessons doled out and learned, are not. There’s a real and powerful wit in these songs, but that doesn’t meanToledodoesn’t take Joe’s travails seriously, and over the course of these 12 songs, he builds an epic out of the simplest materials. Rock history teaches us you can’t will a masterpiece into existence, but withCar Seat Headrest‘sTeens of Denial,Will Toledohas created something like a novel after previously offering us short stories, and it’s a piece of rough-hewn brilliance. -All Music Guide

Double vinyl LP pressing includes digital download. With Teens of Denial, his first real “studio” album with an actual band, Will Toledo moves from bedroom pop to something approaching classic rock grandeur and huge (if detailed and personal) narrative ambitions, with nods to the Cars, Pavement, Jonathan Richman, Wire, and William Onyeabor. Teens of Denial refracts Toledo’s particular, personal story of one difficult year through cultural touchstones such as the biography of Frank Sinatra, the evolution of the Me Generation as seen in Mad Men and elsewhere, plus elements of Eastern and Western theology. The whole thing flaunts a kind of conceptual, lyrical, and musical ambition that has been missing from far too much 21st-century music. Horns, keyboards, and elegant instrumental interludes set off art-garage moments; vivid vocal harmonies follow punk frenzy. The selfish captain of the capsized cruise liner in the Mediterranean in 2013 becomes a metaphor for struggles of the individual in society, as experienced by one hungover young man on the verge of adulthood.