Making a Door Less Open by Car Seat Headrest

Making a Door Less Open, Car Seat Headrest's 12th album, came out on Matador on May 1, 2020, and it's the record where Will Toledo, who first made his name with a stream of lo-fi projects on Bandcamp, went electronic. The detour ran through 1 Trait Danger, a side project Toledo shares with drummer Andrew Katz, and its fingerprints are everywhere here, with EDM-flavored pulse crowding in on the old ragged guitar sprawl. Ethan Ives and Seth Dalby round out the band.

It's also deliberately unstable: every format of the record comes with its own running order and its own versions of the songs, so there's no single definitive MADLO. "Hollywood" is the loudest provocation, while "Can't Cool Me Down" simmers. Critics mostly warmed to the new sound and Toledo's lyrics, though some found the experiment forgettable and half-finished.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.