The Final Terror: Twin Fantasy & The Aftermath of The Queer Death Loop
how I heard Car Seat Headrest's "Twin Fantasy" the first time, how I hear it now, and how I escaped the in-between
My freshman-year induction into queerness nearly killed my soul.
During that time, I was oscillating between trying to exist in online queer circles and being punished by my family for doing so. Between being traumatized and finding community with trans teenagers, also being traumatized, also desperately reaching for affection and validation. My first Queer Death Loop wasn’t just marked by that experience of constant suffering, but by the encroaching suspicion that I would never escape. To me, queerness was not the struggle between some “gay” self and the nebulous evil of homophobia. Instead, a queer-and-happy version of myself was an unreachable ideal: a pipe-dream life of Amazon striped skirts and social acceptance, one that was worlds away from the hell I was trying to survive. For years, I could only approach that dream when I was in the dark, behind locked bathroom doors: when I put on my first skirt (that I snuck into my backpack and gave to a friend the day after I got it); when I texted my friends from across the country on the old family phone, barely able to conceptualize their physical bodies; when I imagined, when my brain was free to imagine, that my imagined world could arrive, if I just imagined hard enough.
By that time, many of my friends already knew about Car Seat Headrest. Twin Fantasy was a longtime cult album on forums and Discord servers populated by isolated queer teenagers, communities that I quickly joined; their horror stories about the album’s supposedly specific breed of despair scared me away from listening until a year later, when my parents forced me to break up with my first partner and I had no friends and I needed someone to sympathize with me. I remember it so well—I was in the living room, my headphones on as they always were, my face contorted like it always was, every minute seeping below my skin like needles.
In the coming years, every song on that album would become important to me, but the first song to resonate was “Famous Prophets”: it was the sixteen-minute song’s extended outro that finally did it for me, a tender piano ballad destroyed by walls of guitars and wails and distorted chops of the album intro track’s harmonies; “it’ll take some time, but somewhere down the line, we won’t be alone,” he sang on that first song, and now that first and last moment of pure, unadulterated hope was torn apart, like a dramatic teenager ripping up a journal entry; and I finally felt the warmth of someone’s empathy. When you’re in the queer death loop, it often feels normal, even comfortable, but this album broke me out of my comfort, held a subconscious mirror to my trauma and let me peer through. As the song’s final outro kicked in—a recitation of 1 Corinthians 13, the Bible passage about the power of real love—I started crying, as I rarely ever did.
For the rest of that year, I would listen to Twin Fantasy over and over, when I was walking to class and sitting on my couch and on Discord with friends. While I did, I would indulge my hypothetical-secret-half-fantasies about getting new parents and a renewed body and renewed luck; I would think about the fact that my soul could have been born anywhere else, that everything could have been different for me. For me, adulthood wasn’t a goal nor an impossibility. That much control was simply out of the scope of my imagination. All I could imagine, and dream of, was a better teenagehood, and that was even less attainable. It took me until halfway through high school to meet queer people who had good parents and healthy relationships and the medication they needed—even then, it was usually only through the television—and every time, I would only get angrier and angrier.
“I am almost completely soulless!” Toledo yelps on the power-pop triptych “Beach Life-In-Death”. “I am incapable of being human!” This is, perhaps, the thesis of Twin Fantasy.
Twin Fantasy was an heirloom, an inheritance of teenage queerness, one of those shared experiences that only we could understand, a depiction of romance and longing and disappointment and melodrama that somehow mapped onto each of our lives. For me and for thousands of others, those whose lives were atrophying in real time, this album was ours. It was comfortable, because it taught us that these feelings were real. It was terrible, because it taught us that these feelings were forever. It gave us just enough hope to imagine a future, just enough despair to believe that future would never come.
I believe that the human soul is invincible, as much as any material matter on this planet, but also just like normal old mass, it can feel like one’s humanity is being stomped on and scattered and re-molded into strange new shapes that nobody thought to invent before. Being a queer kid, or a victim of trauma, or both—it ages you, some say, molds you into maturity before your time. But we weren’t mature nor maturing. We were being torn apart.
My eternal desire became to blast “Bodys”—the album’s most upbeat expression of passion—through a speaker, locked in a bedroom with my future partner, and just dance. Nothing else to worry about, to think about. Just to dance. That was my dream, my only dream.
Upon the release of Car Seat Headrest’s Twin Fantasy (Face to Face), a re-imagining of frontman Will Toledo’s lo-fi cult album from seven years prior, Toledo declared through a press release that he “no longer sees his own story as a tragedy”.
At nineteen, now the same age as Toledo when he released the original Twin Fantasy, I am trying to reach that point, too. I’m trying to unlearn the mindset of COVID-era isolated depression: the motions of life that convinced me that I live in a tragedy and, more importantly, that I should never have to leave, that I should never want to leave. This is my life, the voice told me, the voice that haunts this album, that haunted my psyche. Why would I abandon this life? What could be better?
The re-recorded version of Twin Fantasy, much like its predecessor, soundtracked that same despair among so many young, chronically online queers. It convinced us that we would never move on from the doom that Toledo himself had moved on from.
And yet, listening back to and reading about Twin Fantasy now, I see the hints of resolution that Toledo planted throughout the re-recording, the overarching message that, as he says on the album’s finale, “these are only lyrics now”. I didn’t see them then, because I couldn’t imagine a world in which that resolution was possible. On my first listen of this album, and dozens after, I couldn’t imagine that Twin Fantasy was a seven-year-old story in someone’s past. Its pain was my past, present, and future.
Now, I like to imagine that things are better. I write this from the campus of my university thousands of miles from my home, freer than I have ever been. My suffering might be eternal or whatever, but most of the time my joy trumps it. I’m not visibly queer to everyone yet and I’m living under the second Trump administration but for now I’m at a place in my life that I was convinced I would never reach—if not pervasive joy, then at least normalcy.
The music of Car Seat Headrest, my boyfriend tells me, is best at romanticizing pain, convincing the listener that normalcy is unreachable and undesirable. Just like an online best friend, Car Seat Headrest convinces you that the queer death loop is where good art is made and where your pain can be transformed into screams and where you can survive what’s happened to you. This is not true. A life cannot be lived in the loop. Now, I know that. Now, simply by surviving long enough, I’ve disproven the death loop’s most potent lie: that the loop is all there is to queer existence.
Back then, I knew only the Steam chats where I cried with my trans friends who were trying to die; now, I see many of them escaped or escaping, finally living their lives. Life isn’t materially better for many of us or even most of us, but eventually we came to realize that there is a way out, a better life to be had, even if we haven’t achieved it. But I didn’t know there was a way out before I found it. So, I would put on “Sober To Death,” singing along as Will Toledo screams “you and me won’t be alone no more,” disbelieving that promise just as strongly as Will Toledo must have disbelieved it when he wrote it the first time. Now, just the slightest bit, I dare to believe it.
A few months ago, I re-listened to Face to Face for the first time in years. It took me up and down in the same ways, from hope to desperation and back again, but it was as if viewing a flash of memories in a lucid dream. I saw my life as visions, of staring out of a car window and of talking to my first girlfriend over text chat and of sitting motionless next to a box of tissues, and, suddenly, it was a story in my past. A tragedy, sure, but a tragedy amidst an incomplete narrative. I could not have seen when I first discovered this album what was to come, what my life could be after the death loop exited my body: the pain and confusion, sure, but also the hope, and mostly how tangible all of it could feel, how it could feel to feel, to be alive, truly alive. And yet, the moment still felt as real as it could have. I remember the COVID era as a series of blurs and repressed memories, but listening to this album, it all rushed back, and reliving those moments—the infinite setbacks and minor joys along the path of survival—almost felt good. That was my life, wasn’t it? Damn.
Often since then, I would wonder how it must have felt for Toledo to re-record this album, to dig back into his own death loop as I was trying to do, dust off this unfinished masterpiece and relive his nightmares and re-record it as if he was nineteen again. As I perused interview articles in search of an answer, I found my premise itself contradicted: all those years ago, I had missed so much about the album.
About Sober to Death, in a text-chat-interview excerpt that I’ve added proper grammar to because I’m a stickler, he wrote: “yeah, I regret writing parts of it—I like the end, but that’s about it. It’s a fine song, but it’s kind of toxic … I don’t know if I’ve corrected it in this version, but I’ve amended it.” I remember how this song was a touchstone in my most horrid of long-distance relationships between myself and a boy in the summer before sophomore year. Both of us took it at face value—we knew both versions of the song, and knew no difference between them. You can touch me, we sang from a million miles away, when punching mattresses gets old. We believed it.
“The original version was kind of doomed,” he said, “because it was such an isolated dream. I liked the dream enough to want to put it in a sustainable environment, and that meant bringing it more into the light.”
Twin Fantasy, the 2018 version, was an album borne of perspective: its original version relied on hope and its demise, both within the broader narrative of tragedy, but this newer version pulls that assumption apart and lets the narrative expand in every direction. Its happiness is looser at points, its sadness more crushing, its ultimate resolution more full. He had transformed the album to let it escape the queer death loop; I was listening intently, still locked inside.
It took me years to discover that the outro of “Famous Prophets” was an addition to Face to Face, not present in the album’s original version. I remember feeling cheated: How could Will Toledo have done this to me? How could he have contrived emotions that deep from a seven-year-old breakup? How could he have written that and not been nineteen? As I dug further, I discovered one thing about the outro: the Bible verse that ended the track was itself meant to be positive. “The intent is to reclaim it as what it was actually supposed to convey,” he says. I was fully sure that this passage of Scripture, this passage that my parents used to memorize, was being weaponized against me, just as it always had been. This time, it wasn’t; it meant nothing more than what it said—love never fails.
The emotions Will conjured in this outro, this song, this revision—it was all genuine, a passionate wail of forgiveness and acceptance. Perhaps I should have listened to the passage’s closing words: “For now we see only reflection as in a mirror, then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”
Now, like Toledo, like my future Heavenly self, I see more fully than I ever have. I was not mature then, and I’m not now, but I see my past more clearly every day, and I think that’s enough.
We’re all moving on. One of my friends from 2021 actively forced himself a year ago to stop listening to Car Seat Headrest. By contrast, I left the cult more slowly: for the past couple years, I’ve spun up their music once every six months, enjoyed it, and moved on with my life. These are only songs now.
At the same time, I’ve been reshaping my own definitions of queerness: I discovered an obsession with queer joy, and I wrote essay after essay about the concept, feeling liberated in my discovery that it could be possible to be happy because of queerness, not in spite of it. Even if I wasn’t quite there, I suddenly realized it was possible. And then, even as the destructive forces still stared me down, I unknowingly shed the death loop.
In my boyfriend’s bedroom last year, “Bodys” suddenly started blasting through the speakers. I recognized it immediately, all the blood rushing to my head, and I turned to him. “Is this Car Seat Headrest?”
“Remember? Last year, you told me you wanted to dance to ‘Bodys,’ right? Get up!”
I reach over and hit skip. “I can’t do it,” I apologize. “I don’t know. I just can’t.”
He nods. “Red Wine Supernova” comes on, and he falls back on the bed, next to me. I am love.
had no clue the ending of “Famous Prophets” was a bible verse! really great essay, thanks for sharing :)