Car Seat Headrest have shared the animated video for their new song “Hollywood,” the latest track off their upcoming LP Making a Door Less Open.
“This song is about Hollywood as a place where people go to make their fantasies come to life, and they end up exploiting other people and doing terrible things to maintain their fantasy,” frontman Will Toledo said in a statement.
“There’s this terror you’re going to lose the fantasy, and you’re going to have to face the facts, and some people will do anything to avoid facing that. It’s about that fear and the pain of being subjugated to someone else’s fantasy against your will, and it’s all tied together under this banner of this physical location of Hollywood that we all know about and dream about, but none of us really want to think about what is going on behind the scenes there.”
Making a Door Less Open is a quasi-collaboration between Car Seat Headrest and 1 Trait Danger, Toledo’s electronic music side project where he records under the moniker Trait; that alter ego appears in the “Hollywood” video, wearing a gas mask.
“Bob Dylan said, ‘If someone’s wearing a mask, he’s gonna tell you the truth … if he’s not wearing a mask, it’s highly unlikely,’” Toledo previously said of his alter ego. “He never actually wore a mask onstage so I don’t know why he said that. But I decided to start wearing a mask for a couple of reasons. One, I still get nervous being onstage with everybody looking at me. If everyone is looking at the mask instead, then it feels like we’re all looking at the same thing, and that is more honest to me.”
Car Seat Headrest previously shared “Can’t Cool Me Down” and “Martin” from the new album, which is available to preorder now ahead of its May 1st release.
Car Seat Headrest’s planned summer tour has been canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, while many artists have also postponed the release of their new albums, “MADLO will not be delayed, I promise,” Toledo tweeted.