By his own admission, Will Toledo was never the most outgoing of folks during his formative years, which might explain how he started playing music as Car Seat Headrest. Instead of enlisting others to play his songs, he’d drive to empty parking lots and record them alone in a car.

Captured on tape recorders and computer, his DIY takes on reverb-bathed indie rock, vintage psychedelia, and lo-fi techno would eventually find their way onto Bandcamp, where the legend of Car Seat Headrest began to grow. Today, Toledo is an indie-nation next big thing, with his Matador Records debut, Teens of Style, having received endless accolades from the usual taste-making suspects.

All the attention has taken a bit of getting used to, mostly because he never expected it.

“Early on,” Toledo says, “I decided that I didn’t want to have to promote my stuff and shop it around—show it to people who wouldn’t get it. I decided that I would put it out there and let people who wanted to find it find it.”

Given his less than outgoing nature, it’s funny that—following his graduation from college—the Leesburg, Virginia, native moved across the country to Seattle, Washington. That he knew only a single person in the Emerald City was, strangely, not a concern.

“Starting out was certainly hard, not knowing anyone there but my one friend,” Toledo says, on the line from a tour van making its way to Boise, Idaho. “At the same time, that was going to be the case no matter where I was. I was graduating but didn’t have a whole lot of friends in my own class. I was on my own in terms of what I was going to do. A lot of people moved to New York, and I knew I didn’t want to do that because it was expensive to live there. So instead I moved to Seattle. It seemed like a much better place for doing music than Virginia was.”

Toledo studied English in college and notes that he signed on for a postsecondary education mostly because his parents had put away money for him to do so. Even while he was in school, though, he knew that Car Seat Headrest was his passion, partly because he knew that he was good at it. That’s evident on last October’s Teens of Style, which found Toledo reworking his older material for a new audience.

The songwriter understands the power of dynamics; witness the way that gauze-swaddled “Sunburned Shirts” unleashes a lethal distortion bomb halfway through, or the way punch-drunk horns swell up in “Time to Die”. Toledo is just as good at playing things straightforward, with “Psst, Teenagers, Take Off Your Clothes” blazing like the Strokes before they completely lost the plot. And he’s unafraid to step outside of the guitar-bass-and-drums comfort zone, with “Los Borrachos” piping glitched-out techno through a tinny AM radio.

While he was initially loath to share his songs with anyone else, his Bandcamp postings slowly built up a major underground following. He posted 12 albums on the site, many of his songs sporting fabulously fucked lyrics like “When I was a kid I fell in love with Michael Stipe/I took lyrics out of context and thought he must be speaking to me.”

Toledo—who now plays with a full band—has more than one friend in Seattle these days. And with a new Car Seat Headrest album titled Teens of Denial in the can and ready for release this year, his days of recording alone in empty parking lots would now seem to be behind him.

“I never had too many friends, but as the music thing sort of grew, so did my friend circle,” he says. “It’s been a really organic growth all around.”

Car Seat Headrest plays the Cobalt on Sunday (January 24).