Label gives Car Seat Headrest more confidence

Will Toledo started making music in his bedroom as a Virginia high school student, recording introspective pop tunes on his computer and posting them with little fanfare to Bandcamp. He released his work under the name Car Seat Headrest, and the songs, which Toledo uploaded at a rapid clip, began generating interest from music blogs and journalists.

Now Toledo is 23, he lives in Kirkland, Washington, and he’s signed to Matador Records, a label that counts Yo La Tengo, the New Pornographers and Queens of the Stone Age amongst its stable of artists. Toledo says he’s always second-guessed his own talent – when the first four Car Seat Headrest albums were self-released online, they came with a warning to listeners that they were “not very good” – but having the backing of a respected label was a step in a more self-assured direction.

“You always have a lot of self-doubt starting out as an artist whether your stuff is any good,” Toledo said. “Even if people tell you that it is, it’s hard to believe it until you’re really operating on a full scale level. So having the opportunity to do that, things really clicked into place with me, and I felt a lot more confident as an artist.”

Car Seat Headrest’s most recent album is titled “Teens of Style,” 11 tracks of hooky, fuzzed-out minimalist pop that immediately recalls Guided by Voices, themselves a former Matador band. Recorded in bedrooms, apartments and garages, the LP features fresh versions of songs from Toledo’s extensive back catalog.

“Re-recording and reconstituting old stuff – it’s something I’m always doing,” Toledo said. “I listen to the old stuff fairly often, so that’s part of the reason I did this album in the first place and how I knew what I wanted on it. … They’re documents of my past, and it’s interesting to look at them and how I’ve changed.”

The lyrics on “Teens of Style,” some of which were written when Toledo was still a teenager, often express the malaise and frustrations of a young guy trying to scrape by as a musician.

“All of my friends are getting married / all of my friends are right with God,” Toledo muses on “Times to Die.” “All of my friends are making money / But art gets what it wants and art gets what it deserves.”

On “Strangers,” he examines the foolish but passionate pursuit of artistic fulfillment: “When I was a kid I fell in love with Michael Stipe / I took lyrics out of context and thought / ‘He must be speaking to me.’ ”

In the spring, Car Seat Headrest will release an album of all-new material called “Teens of Denial,” and it’s going to be the flip side of its similarly titled predecessor: It’ll be more polished than “Teens of Style,” Toledo says, utilizing the studio space, engineers and backing musicians he never had access to before.

“It’s a total 180,” Toledo said. “I kind of wanted to use ‘Teens of Style’ as a way of reintroducing my older stuff. (‘Teens of Denial’) is more straightforward rock music, which I kind of strayed away from in the recent Car Seat Headrest recordings.”

Toledo is now touring with a three-piece backing band, which brings him to the Bartlett on Monday night.

“One year ago, a tour would have seemed infeasible, and even if it had, it probably wouldn’t have been very good,” Toledo said. “But now we’re booking lots of tours, and I think we’re playing pretty well. Hopefully other people agree with that.”