The most notable thing we know about Bill Fox is that we know almost nothing notable about him, and that’s still more than he might like us to know. In the 1980s he fronted a short-lived but well-loved band called the Mice, whose brand of catchy, acerbic power pop inspired Elliott Smith and fellow Buckeyes Guided by Voices. He released a series of solo albums—like 1996’s Shelter From the Smoke and 1998’s Transit Byzantium—that are considered beloved cult artifacts. Yet he has consistently torpedoed any opportunity to become more than a cult artist. He broke up the Mice on the eve of a national tour, and he responded to a major-label offer by becoming a recluse. Fans and a few dogged journalists have sought him out in Cleveland and even located him, but Fox responds with prickly pleas for privacy. He releases an album or two every decade, although it’s unclear whether he’s still writing and recording or has simply amassed a big enough back catalog to mete out as needed.
Fox is cult by choice, but his music is neither extreme nor especially idiosyncratic. He draws from familiar sources—California folk rock, Midwestern power pop, British Invasion—and he seems to be a fan of Dylan, Springsteen (in particular Nebraska), the Beatles, maybe Big Star or Cheap Trick. He traffics in popular touchstones rather than obscure references, as though he wants his songs to sound familiar and accessible: easy to grasp and easy to enjoy. The lo-fi sound quality lends them a living-room intimacy, unfussy and first-take casual. Usually cult artists are cult artists because their vision is too esoteric to appeal to more than a few, but this doesn’t seem to be the case with Fox. He may avoid contact with fans and press, but his music seems to be a means of reaching out; his songs express an intense desire to connect with the larger world. “Let me come before you, let me lose this weight,” he sings on “Desperation.” “Take my hand and understand, say it’s not too late.”
There’s no trace of reluctance or ambivalence on Resonance, Fox’s first album in 13 years; it’s full of sharp lyrics, vivid imagery, crushing confessions, and endearing musical flourishes. Listen to the way Fox opens “My Servin’ Time” with a great rush of words, nimbly navigating the tricky rhythms and internal rhymes: “You’ve been grievin’ for me leavin’ and believin’ I’ll abandon you behind.” But also listen for that strange tape warble that punctuates the performance, as though Fox is recording to an old, warped cassette. Someone else might have scrapped that take, but Fox seems to appreciate the serendipity of the effect. The lo-fi setting might amplify the bitterness of “The Biggest Sale,” but it can also be close to magical. Some odd, unidentifiable something adds a strident beat to the first of “Terminal Way”—it might be a box top or saucepan—and then the chorus reveals it to be a tambourine. Hearing that familiar jangle is like watching a sleight-of-hand trick.
Fox has provided very few details about these new songs. Presumably he plays all the instruments, although we do know that GBV guitarist Doug Gillard added a beautiful solo on “Wildflower.” There’s no indication as to when he wrote or recorded them, and the varying degrees of lo in the lo-fi production suggests he culled the album from various sessions (the relatively polished “Got Her on My Mind” features what sounds like a full band, with organist and even back-up singers). Despite its classic pop touchstones, Resonance nevertheless sounds closely, almost inescapably engaged with the present moment. Fox has always been a politically minded songwriter; in fact, as of this writing, the Mice’s most streamed song by a long shot is “Not Proud of the USA,” which hits even harder in 2025 than it did in 1985. Political corruption and national shame are, like rock’n’roll, both timeless and timely. “Meat Factory” may work over a pat conceit about a slaughterhouse where “all your early childhood hopes get mangled in the blades and spokes,” but with its wheezing harmonica and hymn-like repetition, it recalls the working-class worries of Springsteen. Fox clearly sympathizes with the everyday workers whose lives are wasted on the killing floor, and he clearly despises the greed that motivates such an inhumane system.
He writes like he’s trying to stoke a rebellion. “Lift Your Heads” might be urging those meat factory laborers to organize and strike: “Lift up your faces, my lonesome kin, lift your eyes up to the top,” he sings. “Open your hearts from without and within, lift your heads don’t let them drop.” It sounds like an old labor-camp tune or a union anthem, something Woody Guthrie or Lead Belly might have sung, but Fox manages to deliver it without acting like history might sanctify the sentiment. The song sounds grounded in the past but also thoroughly contemporary—one of many compelling contradictions in his small catalog. Fox is both recluse and populist, the curmudgeon with a big heart. That makes this album sound bigger than a four-track, bigger than a cult.
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More than most bands that began in the backseat of the family car, Car Seat Headrest seem well-suited for a high-concept rock opera. From the band’s earliest days, when the project was just Will Toledo recording alone in Virginia, songs were never just as simple as singer and subject—his 2011 album Twin Fantasy was a romantic epic sheepishly masquerading as a ramshackle emo record. His 2020 record Making a Door Less Open was essentially a treatise on fame itself, and culminated in Toledo adopting the persona “Trait,” a gas-masked, bunny-eared protagonist previously introduced in a Car Seat Headrest side project called 1 Trait Danger. When Car Seat Headrest began teasing their new record, The Scholars, via an alternate reality game-style website, it felt like an appropriately elaborate rollout for a band who’s rarely taken reality at face value.
And yet, Toledo was hesitant to dive head-on into the full-scale world-building of a rock opera. To hear him tell it, he seemed afraid that he might stumble into one of the genre’s many pitfalls. “You pull something off of The Wall—it’s not necessarily going to be banging on its own. It needs that context,” he told the podcast How Long Gone. “I like when you can pull a song out and have that individual piece.” It’s a brutal assessment of Pink Floyd, though it comes from a deep respect (the original version of Twin Fantasy’s “High to Death” interpolated “Jugband Blues,” after all).
On The Scholars, every song aims to be an “Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2”—nine self-contained epics that, Toledo hopes, will sum to a greater whole. But overburdened by a confusing plot, with no room for a listener to digest the bevvy of settings and characters he’s just introduced, The Scholars is mired in and muddied by the madcap impulses of its creator, drowning out what would otherwise be some of the band’s most inspired, experimental compositions to date. The Scholars is a rock opera for the playlist era; it wants to contain both a richly textured narrative—with all the character development, internal motivations, and rising and falling action required therein—and also nine songs that can stand alone, plucked out of context and jutted up against whatever other songs happen to land on Spotify’s autoplay.
So, the plot: The Scholars takes us to the imaginary Parnassus University, where we meet a cast of students who are all on parallel searches for meaning: our narrator, the Chanticleer; Beolco, a playwright who’s paranoid his best ideas are behind him: “A thousand ideas piled up in the tomb,” he says on “CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You)”; Devereaux, the “son of a backwaters religious conservative” who hopes to find higher meaning on the libertine lawns of the American university (“Devereaux”); and Rosa, a medical student who can revive the dead (“Gethsemane”). There is also, of course, a local community based on dressing in furs and feathers (“Lady Gay Approximately”), which I’ll let the Redditors decipher.
These plot points matter as much as you care to listen closely: There are pivotal moments in the form of a deadly plant and clown raid that I somehow missed in the first listen, too distracted by the stylistic changeups and clouded metaphors crammed into every song. Most of the key narrative drivers are buried in liner notes on the lyric sheet but aren't represented anywhere in the music. Certain songs carry enough momentum to warrant repeat listens out of the album context: “The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man)” takes the familiar punk-leaning pop shape that has defined Car Seat Headrest, the chiming strums of an acoustic guitar giving way to drum fills, reverb, and Toledo’s fuzzy, clipped vocals. The same goes for “True/False Lover,” which careens from guitar solo to verse with the practiced ease of someone who’s spent the past 15 years writing hooks.
But the preceding three songs, which range from 10 minutes on the short end to 18 at the longest, test the premise of the album and the patience of the listener. “Gethsemane” begins quietly with just a synth and Toledo’s voice; “Reality” brings to mind Air’s Moon Safari; “Planet Desperation” is the most forthrightly self-serious, with somber piano and the slow beat of a kick drum. Yet they all manage to wind up in about the same place at their halfway points—stuttering prog interludes, towering electric guitar solos, belted refrains that seem to come out of nowhere and fade just as quickly. Storylines are lost in the mayhem: I feel like I’m catching the plot but then as soon as guitarist Ethan Ives, as Parnassus’ Liberal Arts school dean Hyacinth, sings “I would go out/But there’s a world war,” I feel totally lost again. It’s almost impressive how much these disparate modes seem to converge on a central sound, and how much that sound boils down to: play loud, play fast, repeat. There’s a reason, it seems, that The Wall includes comparatively quieter tracks like “Empty Spaces” or “One of My Turns”—if every song needs to stand alone, they each require some sort of internal climax, a summit that feels exhausting to climb song after song.
Still, The Scholars is filled with compelling experimentation and glimpses of greater potential. Toledo’s voice sounds stronger than ever here, warmly recorded in analog, and songs like “Devereaux,” which lean into power pop influences like the Cars and Cheap Trick, feel like the most successful attempt to combine narrative with concise songcraft. “CCF,” one of the album’s standout songs, sounds like a potential future path for Car Seat Headrest—one that introduces elements of jazz and funk to his fundamentally scrappy sound without overpowering it with heavy-handed signifiers and seemingly endless trips up and down the neck of his guitar. Car Seat Headrest is a band almost predestined for the kind of high-stakes storytelling a rock opera requires—if only Toledo could let his own ideas breathe.
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