Stream: Car Seat Headrest, ‘Can’t Cool Me Down’

S.Lo on February 26th, 2020

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From hypnotic to minimalist, bleepity-bips to dense synths soaking past the edges, Car Seat Headrest have unveiled their new single “Can’t Cool Me Down” today. The song signals a departure, or rather an exploration, beyond the band’s indie-rock roots and an intermingling with frontman Will Toledo and drummer Andrew Katz’s experimental side project 1 TRAIT DANGER, with Toledo taking on the persona “Trait.”

Addressing fans from his new moniker, Trait explains how the move into new directions came to be after realizing how his consumption of new music had evolved, “I realized that because the way I listened to music had changed, I had to change the way I wrote music, as well. I was listening less and less to albums and more and more to individual songs, songs from all over the place, every few days finding a new one that seemed to have a special energy. I thought that if I could make an album full of songs that had a special energy, each one unique and different in its vision, then that would be a good thing.”

“Can’t Cool Me Down” will leave anyone trying to pin it down to any genre in a cold sweat. An announcement for the single shares that two versions of every song on the new album were recorded, one with the full live band (including guitarist Ethan Ives and bassist Seth Dalby) and another with MIDI-based Ableton and synths. As seen on this first preview, elements of both were combined into a hybrid vision, containing several movements unto itself of different styles.

“If there is a new genre emergent in our times,” shares Trait, “it has not yet been named and identified, but its threads come from new ways of listening to all types of music, of new methods of creating music at an unprecedented level of affordability and personal freedom, of new audiences rising up through the internet to embrace works that would otherwise be lost, and above all, from the people whose love of music drives them to create it in the best form they possibly can. Hopefully it will remain nameless for some time, so it can be experienced with that same newness and strangeness that accompanies any and all meaningful encounters with music.”

Take “Can’t Cool Me Down” for a spin and hopefully more will be released from the full-length, “Making a Door Less Open,” which releases on May 1 via Matador, accompanied by a summer Stateside tour.

||| Stream: “Can’t Cool Me Down”