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August Newsletter: Denial
🕑 Added 2025-08-01 19:00:11 +0000 UTCTen summers ago, we were tucked into the corners of Fremont, recording Teens of Denial with Steve Fisk. I remember it being a sunny summer, both literally and emotionally. Teens of Style, recorded earlier that year, had been a difficult trek, marred by difficulties in mixing and miscommunications with the label. Recording Denial, in contrast, was smooth sailing. We’d been playing the songs live at the few shows we could get locally, and having Steve at the helm for recording and mixing took the pressure off me to make every decision. We felt good about the songs, and so did the people working with us; the only thing weighing us down were the heavy burritos we’d order at the restaurant down the street from the studio.
It’s ironic that the recording process was so congenial, because the writing process had definitely been a stormy one. I jumped into it right after the release of Nervous Young Man all the way back in 2013, and spent a year and a half trying to address what seemed at the time to be the failures of NYM (songs too long, album too long, lack of clarity in the mixes). I wanted to write an album full of straight-up rock songs, simple enough that they could be done in the studio without getting bogged down in mixing problems, short enough that they could keep an average listener’s attention. It wasn’t an easy learning curve; I was used to building up long, meandering works on the computer. I spent my senior year hammering out riff after riff on guitar, angrily rejecting ninety-five percent of them. (There was enough rejected material that How To Leave Town came about relatively effortlessly, with many rejected tracks suddenly finding new life on a more freewheeling “EP”.)
I wrote last month about my lifelong struggle with anger and resentment. At no point in my life was this more pronounced than during this period. Many of my good friends had graduated a year before me, leaving a sense of desolation in the town. I was looking at an abrupt cliff past my own graduation, with no real plans or trajectory other than wanting to get out of Virginia. The recreation of staying up late and drinking with friends gave me no solace (had it ever?) and left me with a lot of mornings feeling awful. I’m not proud of what I thought or how I treated those around me at that point in my life. All that negative energy turned into a red-hot cooking surface for Teens of Denial, shaping its form, but also blocking me from making much progress on it for many months. I wasted a lot of energy “sustaining my anger” and I can’t say it helped the creative process.
Yet eventually, the songs eked out. And they reflected what I’d asked for setting out from NYM - a quite different sort of CSH album, with dry, simple songs, and a lot of anger and angst. In its final form, it’s occupied a strange space in our canon. Commercially, it’s been our most successful record, and for fans who aren’t “Car Seat Headrest fans”, they’re most likely to be familiar with songs from Denial. But as far as the “story of the band” goes, its singularity makes it more of an oddball, perhaps overshadowed by records like Twin Fantasy.
What are your experiences with Teens of Denial? Had you heard other records by us, or was it your first? What kind of an album does it seem like to you?
Comments
harris
i mean jen liked it. praying to pink elephants to incept the strenght rn
Stickman!
Teens of Denial to me, is such an epic tale that goes into so much of the depths of youth and adolescence, and it hit me at just the right time in my life. This is my first patreon post here :)), I just joined and I also just joined the fanbase; I probably spinned Twin Fantasy for the first time a year ago or so, and soon after, I began to delve into an obsession into the songwriting of the band, which then snowballed into a larger obsession with 90s indie, GBV, Pavement rock and sprawling psychedelic indie pop that spans from E6 all the way to Papercuts and other beautiful bands from the 00s. My heart really lies in Beatles songwriting, and that's probably what attracted me to the band in the first place; even though I first heard TF it was Nervous Young Man where I fell in love with the songs which are so dense and filled with imagery that I had never really heard before aside from Jeff Mangum et al, but once I heard Denial after treading through most of the discography, it instantly clicked. To me it is fits the description you had said: Some great catchy rock and roll that still contains the themes of youth NYM concerned itself in, but replacing most of the Neil Young noise rock with great Cars, Pavement and The Who hints more than anything. Being also just fresh out of high school and on the introverted side, I fit into the description of most of CSH fans I'd assume, and relate immensely to a lot of really specific details in the songs. English has never been my first language, and because of that I feel like I listen to and relate to a lot of the harmony in music first, then lyrics second. Yet CSH broke that barrier, and I found myself actually singing to the songs, which is rare for most music and even rarer for rock. It really helps me to cope with personal emotions of mine and, when I take away the intellectual-ness of the album, and how awesome it is to identify so many influences, I'm still left with visceral emotion that makes me attracted to the album. To hear such beautiful songwriting that calls back to so much rock, but put to visceral feelings of youth that I thought I would never find anyone to share them with, speaks to what music does to my heart. Drugs With Friends is from the direct lineage of Pavement as well as Hippie Powers combined with some Robert Pollard, Fill in The Blank is some great Green Day revival, Cosmic Hero carries a lot epic Bowie vibes, which maybe could have come from Blackstar? And Vince carrying some left field Pink Floyd references, and yet all these songs call back to feelings I swore I could have only felt myself in the darkness of my room. I'll forever love this album and, it got me inspired, as did CSH as a whole, to make indie rock of my own, not to mass produce or share with everyone, but to speak to my feelings and craft something that can hopefully make me feel heard as this album did. I relish this album so much, and I wish it were something every teen in their life heard at least once. Thank you, Band ;-; -Stickman!
Larissa Rook
i am late to the party. just recently (this year) was introduced to csh by way of my kid. and i suppose the first song i heard off denial was drunk drivers/killer whales. which i love. glad i got to hear it live in los angeles at the greek.
Joseph Brown
I hope, after making ToD, that you have since reconsidered NYM. Both albums are _fantastic_ in different ways (your goals were achieved), but NYM (together with its sister DM) is _easily_ my favourite album of all time :)
sylvie
i came to Denial during a really rough transitional period in the middle of college. these songs helped me externalize a lot of the anger and shame i felt. the lyric “commit yourself completely” started to follow me like a ghost, maybe to an unhealthy extent. i took it like a command: make it through, or don’t. make the change, or don’t. come home tonight, or never call it home again. i think a lot of the CSH songs i love wrestle with what it means to commit yourself completely. do i just need to wake up, burst into motion? is it enough to mend the fence with the best of grace and say “i’m sorry?” is this my salvation plan? all of this is to say that i think Denial boils down a lot of what i love about CSH into one raw, bitter, hard-hitting record. it’s intense and neurotic and i love it.
