On "Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales", a track from Car Seat Headrest's Teens of Denial, Will Toledo suffers from the post-party blues and one too many drinks. It quickly spirals into something deeper. "It comes and goes in plateaus / One month later I'm a fucking pro", he says, before sarcastically suggesting that his "parents would be proud" of his back and forth tussle with anxiety. But with each line, each verse, it gets darker. "It's too late to articulate it / That empty feeling," he groans before desperately pleading, "It doesn't have to be like this". Like attempting to control a vehicle while inebriated, Toledo tries to steer the haphazard direction his life seems to be traveling.
2016's Teens of Denial, echoed my reality like no other indie rock album has been able to. Every track was an ode to young adulthood and the purgatory that it is: not young enough to get away with making bad choices or having someone to tell you what to do, and not old enough to know for sure what life has in store. The album lifted the seal on what it truly meant to be a young person in the modern age—not narcissistic and entitled to what's around them, but disillusioned and disconnected from a world that underestimated them. Teens of Denialtapped into the head of a generation that is hyper aware of the horrors of reality and left with the burden of fixing the mistakes of the past. In a word: lost. It was the first time a piece of music had pinpointed, right down to the molecule, how I and many others felt.
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