The Scholars

Set at the fictional college campus Parnassus University, the songs on The Scholars are populated with students and staff whose travails illuminate a loose narrative of life, death, and rebirth. Inspired by an apocryphal poem by "Archbishop Guillermo Guadalupe del Toledo," and featuring character designs from Toledo’s friend, the cartoonist Cate Wurtz, the first half of the album focuses on the deep yearning and spiritual crisis of the titular Scholars. They range from the tortured and doubt-filled young playwright Beolco to Devereaux, a person born to religious conservatives who finds themselves desperate for higher guidance.

The second part features a series of epics detailing the clash between the defenders of the classic texts “and the young person who doesn't care about the canon, who is going to tear all of that up, basically,” Toledo says. “And so within this one campus, there becomes a war.” From Shakespeare to Mozart to classical opera, Toledo pulled from the classics when devising the lyrics and story arc of The Scholars, while the music draws, carefully, from classic rock story song cycles such as The Who’s Tommy and David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust.  “One thing that can be a struggle with rock operas is that the individual songs kind of get sacrificed for the flow of the plot,” Toledo notes. “I didn't want to sacrifice that to make a very fluid narrative. And so this is sort of a middle ground where each song can be a character and it's like each one is coming out on center stage and they have their song and dance.”

Self-produced by Toledo and recorded, for a change, mostly in analog, The Scholars is “definitely the most bottom up of any project that we've done,” says Ives, who was urged by Toledo to take ownership of the guitar work and sound design for the album. “I've started nerding out a lot more in the last couple of years about designing sounds more deliberately, rather than just using your lucky gear and hoping for the best. It was really rewarding, being able to sculpt things a lot more specifically, and being able to layer things in more of a dense way and have more of an active design role in how things come across more than any previous album.”

Released: May 2025
Cat: OLE2132LP
Label: Matador