National - Sad Songs For Dark Times

The National are one of the most atypical, and at the same time most significant, bands of the decade that has just ended. Semi-professionals who found success not exactly in their youth, and for that reason mature and smart enough to keep a careful, low-key attitude towards popularity (including the indie and pseudo-indie kind). Always cherished by critics, but only recently (after the success of Boxer in 2007) revealed to an international audience. Careful never to take themselves too seriously. Without striking the pose of metropolitan poets. Keeping the hype at a safe distance. Midnight Bohemians. Provincial romantics in New York, because even though Cincinnati, their hometown, has more than 300,000 inhabitants, compared to the Big Apple pretty much the rest of the world looks provincial. Brilliant and worldly, yet at the same time unkempt and crepuscular. Intellectuals of music with a pronounced sense of understatement and irony.

Musically, the band led by Matt Berninger and the Dessner and Devendorf brothers (and, not insignificantly, by Padma Newsome) offers, in a sense, a gauge of how "old" American alternative rock - and New York's in particular - evolved in the new millennium: starting out from a canonical indie-rock with urban-tinged roots inflections, to land on one hand in "border" territories (the post-punk revival, European-style dark and noir shades, chamber minimalism), and on the other in the recovery of a more nostalgic, heartfelt form of pop song, in the highest sense of the term, of a more handcrafted melodic extroversion. Both disturbed from within and subtly shifted out of context. Searching, album after album, for that "perfect song" declared as their intent in one of their earliest tracks. And getting damn close to it. Over the years achieving the status of a small singer-songwriter ensemble comparable, with due proportion and considering the different lineages, to that of the Bad Seeds in the previous decade.

Emblematic in this sense is the charismatic figure of Berninger - a singer who, in certain inflections, can recall the most intimate and brooding Nick Cave, in the way he makes baritone detachment and melodic emotiveness his trademark - the author of intelligent, refined lyrics, poised between lyrical impressionism, ironic introspection and social commentary, which rank him among the most original chroniclers of post-9/11 existential precariousness. From 1999 to 2009, from the last, less-than-glorious days of the Clinton presidency to the hopes rekindled by the prophecy of a "Mr November", Barack Obama, tasked with the impossible job of turning the page on one of the least edifying chapters of "national" history. An "apartment story", spied on through bedroom curtains, explored through small-yet-huge everyday incidents, within that private sphere which is the only refuge for anyone seeking shelter from the public madness of their time.

American Mary: love in the time of Ground Zero

New York is the place to hide, lose yourself, or find yourself. Those aren't my words but Truman Capote's. And someone who, barely of age, trades the cornfields of Monroeville for the skyscrapers of Manhattan knows exactly what he's talking about. The story of the National also begins with a move to New York. Admittedly a far less traumatic one: from Hamilton County to Brooklyn, from the Ohio River to the East River. Matt Berninger, twins Aaron (multi-instrumentalist: bass, guitar, piano, drums) and Bryce Dessner (guitar), and brothers Scott (bass and guitar) and Bryan Devendorf (drums) — all in their mid-twenties, all with surnames rooted in central Europe — are five guys from Cincinnati who, around the turn of the millennium, find themselves, by winding paths, in the city that never sleeps. Some for study, like Bryce, who attends the Yale School of Music and can already boast a solid curriculum (the rock band Project Nim with his brother Aaron in the second half of the '90s, his collaboration with Bang On a Can All-Stars, which puts him in touch with the major names of the minimalist school — from Philip Glass, to Terry Riley, to Steve Reich — and his parallel stint in Clogs with Padma Newsome, a key figure in the band's artistic growth, as we'll see later), some for work, like Matt, an employee at some company caught up in the dot-com boom, and some for other reasons.

Their paths cross, fusing for good between late '99 and early 2000, when they start getting together every day after work and on weekends to write and rehearse songs, which they then record on a shared four-track. At first it's little more than a pastime among friends, old hometown buddies wanting to stay in touch so as not to be swallowed up by the anonymity of the metropolis ("a freak show" as another small-town transplant, Bruce Springsteen of New Jersey, called it twenty years earlier). But male camaraderie only tells part of the story: the five are also excellent musicians of varied backgrounds whose qualities seem to merge effortlessly into a sound that, rehearsal after rehearsal, day after day, starts to reveal its potential. You can sense, in short, that there's something special in what they're doing, that the spark has caught, and the Dessners, the more experienced of the bunch, are the first to notice. So much so that they put their own money on the line, setting up a family label, Brassland Records (in partnership with critic and journalist Alec Hanley Bemis), created essentially to release, with complete freedom and independence, the parallel debuts of National and Clogs.

The key date is 2001. The National's self-titled debut album comes out on October 30, a little over a month after the Twin Towers attacks, in the thick of anthrax-scare paranoia. With Operation "Enduring Freedom" underway and Bill Gates unveiling the new Windows XP operating system to reassure the average American's shaky patriotism. In the very same week that musicians across the country are donating all the proceeds from their concerts to the families of the 9/11 victims.
The National is a snapshot of a highly promising band: lean in its arrangements, skilled in its songwriting, with ideas that are already fairly clear even if still at an early stage of development (the production, colorless and strictly DIY, holds back the material from fully paying off).

The sound is bare-bones and mostly acoustic (with voice, guitars and piano front and center), poised between '90s indie-rock and a modernist, urban strain of alt-country, with fairly pronounced nods to bands like Wilco and Uncle Tupelo, and to the classics of American rock songwriting, filtered through just enough of a personal stamp. Compared to the records that will cement their rise, though, you can tell something's still missing: the songs are concise and a bit tight, built along fairly predictable genre lines, lacking the orchestral sweep and rhythmic drive (the Devendorfs, especially Bryan on drums: flat, repetitive, understated) that will later become true hallmarks of their sound.

Taken as a whole, the songwriting is anything but unpleasant: opener "Beautiful Head" has an almost twee gait filtered through a distinctly American idiom; "Cold Girl Fever" and "Anna Freud," among the strongest melodies here, are romantic, metronomic ballads; "The Perfect Song" and "John's Star" show the first stirrings of a dry, electric, distortion-tinged edge (the Dessners' guitar work, excellent here as throughout much of the album) paired with Tindersticks-style noir (a)tonalities (especially in Berninger's vocals), while "Watching You Well" and "Bitters & Absolut" hold down the more country-oriented side. Elsewhere they look to the past, but with a glance more evasive than nostalgic: the obsessive, percussive post-Velvet pulse and Reed-like tone of "Son," the Nashville-flavored "American Mary," the Creedence vibe again with Lou Reed at the mic on "Pay For Me," the Young-esque epic sweep of "The Theory Of The Crows." More tucked away, almost out of focus, is "29 Years" (whose lyrics will later resurface as "Slow Show" on Boxer), a grimy, lo-fi recording in the vein of Oldham, Molina, and Joyner.

Another point in the debutants' favor comes from the lyrics, which already reveal, between the lines, Berninger's gift for description: small sketches of intimacy, crepuscular memories that transcend their natural domestic setting to paint, through the romantic disorientation and failure of their protagonists, an aching, ironic portrait of contemporary America — which, like the woman at the center of "Beautiful Head," seems to have changed overnight, growing hollow and indifferent, "raising the bar" on security at the expense of happiness and freedom. Other themes that will later become recurring: lost innocence/awareness and a wistfulness for adolescence in "The Perfect Song" and "29 Years"; the story of a small-town girl who denies herself to claim the crown of the "fake empire" still to come, like the beauty queen of "Anna Freud"; a childhood marked by a family falling apart in "Son."

Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers

Despite the band being virtually unknown — having never actually played live before the album's release — The National earns solid reviews and a modest following, securing a hardcore fan base concentrated mainly between Ohio and the New York area. Over the following two years, while still keeping their semi-professional status (being musicians remains, for some of them, a second, occasional job), the National work on their second album, again self-released on Brassland, this time with a more generous budget and the addition of two collaborators who will become permanent fixtures over time, proving to be an ideal complement to the original lineup.

The first, as mentioned earlier, is Padma Newsome. Australian, born in 1961, formerly a violinist with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and something of a musical wanderer (at one point he drops everything and sets off on a journey of self-discovery lasting nearly six years, which takes him all the way to an ashram in New South Wales!), an arranger and composer working in a neoclassical, minimalist style geared toward reviving traditional music. He's the golden-armed man, the right musician to bring the Dessners' harmonic instincts to fruition, steer them clear of certain indie clichés, and give the band's sound real depth and originality. The second is Peter Katis, a young sound engineer and independent producer (with his own Tarquin Records) on the New York scene, who already has to his credit the co-production of Interpol's debut (a band the National will sometimes be compared to, especially around Boxer), "Turn On The Bright Lights," one of the most acclaimed albums of the decade, as well as his work with Oneida on "Each One, Teach One."

It's partly thanks to their contribution, combined with exponential growth on every front, that the band is finally able to make a real difference on Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers. On this second album — practically perfect from the title alone, a true epitome of their musical poetics — the seeds planted on the debut blossom lushly, coming together into a more complex and varied sonic flora. The progress is evident first and foremost in the songwriting, which is decidedly more refined, mature and personal, reshaping the boundaries of the song form in a hazier, more diffuse way without losing its innate melodic fragrance. The same goes for the arrangements, marked by the instrumental richness of a pop/rock ensemble and a pronounced atmospheric bent. The range of genres and styles brought together is wider too: against the basic alt-country backdrop, post-punk facets, melodic punk'n'roll, slo-core, chamber pop and even traces of electronic pointillism emerge ever more clearly. The production quality improves considerably as well: crisp, tight, bright, fluid. The kinetic hub of this small metamorphosis is the rhythm section (led by the extraordinary drummer Bryan Devendorf), almost unrecognizable compared to the previous record: forceful yet nimble, versatile yet precise, chameleon-like in how it can alternately sketch contrasts in the background, hang softly and elegantly in suspension, or burst into sudden syncopated crescendos.

The expressive power gained by the "new" National reveals itself in full from the opening one-two punch: "Cardinal Song" — the tender, hazy, melancholy side (the lyrics read like an ironic breviary of the perfect seducer, which by the end gives way to bitterness and loneliness), the "sad song" that most closely recalls late-period Red House Painters — with its muffled rhythm, the soft electro-acoustic interplay of the two guitars (the dreamy tone of the electric, the crackling strums of the acoustic), then a sharp shift at the end into a boudoir passage for solo voice, acoustic guitar and violin; "Slipping Husband" — the other side of the coin: harshly rural, raw, post-punk — a whipped-along pace, galloping guitars, wicker-work fingerpicking, vibraphone chimes and female backing vocals on the chorus, describing in just a few lines an absent, alcoholic father and the traumatic entry into adulthood of a once-promising young man, pushed to the brink by Berninger in near-screamo tones ("Dear we better get a drink in you/ before you start to bore us").

In tune with the first song: "90 Mile Waterfront," split in two by a searing violin solo from Newsome; "It Never Happened," an alt-country base with a soft, sardonic melody, one of the album's most memorable, which midway through dissolves into a scene change: just guitar and drums for an insistent, mottled instrumental digression that almost recalls Sonic Youth of the previous decade; the chamber pop-noir of "Thirsty": light drums rippling with off-beats, piano entering on the fourth, vintage keyboard flourishes, violin, and a final gospel-like crescendo that feels almost "after hours." And in contrast with the second song: the acid, abrasive moves of "Murder Me Rachael," fast, urgent, percussive, and the dark-punk of "Available," with dueling, overlapping guitars, a haze of fuzz, a hollow, glassy bassline, painting a desperate allegory of two mercenary lovers consuming each other.

Then comes a curious triptych of what we might call "countronic" contaminations: the bittersweet "Sugar Wife" (electro rhythm and muffled horns), "Trophy Wife" (a lively anti-bourgeois satire in the style of "The Graduate"), and, the best of the three, "Patterns Of Fairytale," with its polished picking, dreamlike loops and vocals somewhere between Cohen and the Tindersticks, echoed at the end by a female counter-melody. The only concession to more classic American singer-songwriter epic is the closing torch song, "Lucky You," redeemed nonetheless by refined, personal touches (the break after the second chorus).

Albino Alligator

Hailed by the sharpest observers of the new indie scene (Pitchfork, for one, placed it among the best albums of the year with a score of 8.6), Sad Songs cements the National's cult status in the US and finally gives them the chance to "play with the professionals" (to paraphrase the title of one of the songs on the forthcoming Boxer): in 2004 they leave Brassland (which will carry on independently, producing other affiliated bands) and sign with Beggars Banquet, one of the biggest names in the world of alternative music.

To seal this farewell, the same year the band released the EP titled Cherry Tree, their final act with the "family" label. The release is, however, far from representative. Though it's not a collection of leftovers or sketches tossed off carelessly, the tracks have, on average, little to do with the direction the band had taken and could hardly have lived up to the standards of the new album. Aside from a live version of "Murder Me Rachael" and an "All The Wine" that would come in handy later on, the most interesting track is without doubt the title track: it opens as a Cohen-esque piece built on picking and voice, to which the jazzy piano and muted drums are gradually added, then Newsome's biting, klezmer-tinged violin, which intertwine and heat up until erupting into a whirling, centrifugal coda. The rest is made up of pleasant acoustic brushstrokes like "Wasp Nest", or the darker "All Dolled-Up In Straps" and "I Don't Mind" (the closest thing to Oldham the band ever wrote).

Their first record for Beggars, on the other hand, came out in 2005 under the title Alligator. Far from letting themselves be distracted or intimidated by outside pressures somehow tied to their new contractual situation, the band got to work, reconfirming in full the lineup that had performed so well on Sad Songs (Katis, Newsome, but also Nick Lloyd, organist, keyboardist and collaborator since the early days), while widening their informal ensemble to include other musicians.
Stylistically, Alligator more than worthily continues the path laid out by its predecessor: elements drawn from the "new" post-punk of the 2000s progressively converging with the elegant, minimalist classic songwriting the band had always aspired to. An irresistible mix of martial, syncopated, drum-driven rhythms and airy, but never saccharine, melodic and chamber-like openings. As these aspects increasingly take center stage in the sound of Alligator, the component traceable to 90s alt-rock/alt-country is noticeably reduced.

Seemingly "light", cohesive, controlled, less sprawling, the Brooklyn-based quintet's third full-length is, in terms of songwriting, the most popular and immediate the band had made up to that point. As if the variety and variations of its predecessor had been compressed and chiseled down into a lean, symmetrical format. Striking and uniquely effective.

With its sharp, contrasted drumming and the work of fibrillating guitars, "Secret Meeting" opens the record offering a perfect example of this new pop-wave, songwriter-driven center of gravity. Meanwhile "Karen" - with its lopsided piano gait, melancholic string nuance, and a low, inconsolable lament of a vocal - contains one of their most effortless and infectious hooks ever. Equally inspired and tremendously catchy is "Looking For Astronauts", a sort of semi-acoustic wave'n'billy. Jittery folk-wave fragments take on a clearly Cohen-esque tone in "Baby We'll Be Fine" and a shameless dreamlike, danceable license in "Friend Of Mine", with its barely perceptible electro shadings. On the more classicist side, there's the dirge of "Val Jester", the crepuscular, metronomic ballad "Daughters Of Soho Riots", the chamber minuet of "City Middle" with its hushed choral murmur that swells in the second half. A persistent call back to their roots, meanwhile, shows through in the harder, more guitar-driven tracks: the instinctive rock'n'roll of "Lit Up", the melodic Husker Du-style hardcore sung as Nick Cave might in "Abel", the syncopated folk-punk of the excellent "Mr November".

Lyrically, the record further reinforces the subtext linking the private and the public, the lyrical and the political, in a series of allegorical mirrorings between the characters' troubled romantic affairs and the sad twilight of the American dream at the dawn of George W. Bush's second term: the tender, tragicomic love story between a middle-aged man and a young stripper in "Karen" reflects the sense of emotional disorientation of an entire nation (“Well, whatever you do/ Listen, you better wait for me/ No, I wouldn’t go out alone into America”), the former yuppie adrift at night in "Baby We'll Be Fine", the heroes of the new frontier, of the conquest of space who no longer exist and whom it's pointless to search for ("Looking For Astronauts"), right up to the caustic "Mr November", partly inspired by John Kerry's defeat in November 2004, an explicit critique of the electorate's apathy and resignation, of America's inability, at the start of this millennium, to preserve the libertarian and democratic values it was built on.

Waitin' for Cinderella Man, ovvero, Boxer

Alligator achieved a double result: winning over both critics (who, with few exceptions, reiterated and expanded on the praise already lavished on Sad Songs) and the public (70,000 copies sold on the indie market in the age of file-sharing and the like are, in some ways, a small miracle). The band was by now a frontline presence in alternative music. And thanks to Beggars' backing, they were able to take on their first real American headlining tour, with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (the "big thing" of 2005: among other things, one of the first bands to become famous, even before releasing a single, thanks to songs shared on Myspace - an emblematic case of how much the mechanisms of music distribution have changed over the last decade) as support act. Their definitive consecration was just around the corner, arriving with the next album, released, true to their usual two-year cycle, in 2007.

Boxer is the high point and the ideal culmination of the trilogy launched by Sad Songs. Almost the summa and the nul plus ultra of the most original traits that emerged over the course of their sonic maturation. The ties between the neo-wave component (increasingly tinged with dark, less with punk/indie-rock), the one traceable to classical minimalism (ever more elaborate and layered) and folk/country-schooled songwriting (fully transposed and filtered from its origins) tighten into focus until they become complementary and inseparable in most of the tracks. The album's architecture recalls, in many ways, that of Alligator. But the sounds and atmospheres are noticeably more urban, electric, dark, nervous, oppressive. And the quality of the songs borders, on average, on excellence. From the tighter, more angular tracks like "Mistaken For Strangers" (perhaps the closest thing to Joy Division the band ever recorded) and "Apartment Story" (unsettling and melodic in equal measure), to the sophisticated, orchestral pop of "Racing Like Pro", "Ada" and "Gospel", enriched by the hushed, enveloping contribution of the horn section (and Sufjan Stevens on piano); through the classical overture and cutting rhythm of "Squalor Victoria", the off-beat postmodern lied of "Fake Empire" (one of their signature songs), the Cure-like groundwork and burnished, caressing vocal of "Brainy". With the more songwriterly "Green Gloves", "Start A War" and especially "Slow Show" (an icy, glassy string backdrop over the typical country-derived guitar progression) and the dark-tinged "Guest Room" bookending an album with virtually no weak spots.

Lyrically, Boxer tackles, with more coherence and depth than before, the central theme of the loss of innocence ("another uninnocent elegant fall/ into the unmagnificent lives of adult"), the end of youth (bodies in and out of swimsuits, out of clothes, out of water, stretched out on the grass, bearing the marks of the grass, moving from room to room, growing up in mirrors) and the entry into the alienating, vicious cycle of adulthood (the "guest room" of the song of the same name) as symptoms of a political, moral and civic decline eating away at the country. The mesmerizing satiety of Western consumerism ("Fake Empire"), friendship fading in the drawer of memory ("Green Gloves"), the sentence to loneliness or to companionship within a relationship going to ruin ("Racing Like A Pro", "Apartment Story", "Ada").

Mr November's Revenge

Boxer sold 170,000 copies in the United States alone. It's the classic big indie success story. One that propelled The National toward a wider, international audience, opening the doors to the Billboard chart (peaking at number 68) and national television (appearances on the Letterman Show, the video for "Apartment Story" in rotation during MTV's late-night slot). It earned them a support slot on R.E.M.'s tour and a place on the bill at major American and European festivals (the first time the band set foot on the old continent). But the group trod carefully. They didn't try to strike while the iron was hot, to channel the newfound goodwill into a string of carefully calculated releases. And when they did act, it was for a good cause: as in July 2008, when a t-shirt bearing Barack Obama's image and the cryptic words of "Mr November" was put on sale, with proceeds donated to the Democratic candidate's campaign fund. A campaign that would be underscored by the notes of "Fake Empire", an integral part of the soundtrack to countless events, including the Democratic Convention on August 28 of that same year. And this time, on November 4, 2008, "Mr November won't fuck us over" - and he didn't. The circle closed. That same year The National released, through their old label, a collection of unreleased material, covers and live recordings titled The Virginia Ep.
In 2009, with the band now signed to 4AD as part of the Beggars Group restructuring, Aaron and Bryce Dessner curated the twentieth edition of Red Hot's charity compilation series, "Dark Was The Night".

Having become one of the past decade's big alternative names, The National reached a pivotal point in their career with High Violet (2010). The new album slowed down the evolution-through-continuity that had characterized the trilogy of previous works, crystallizing the sonic formula achieved on Boxer and adding a few extra ingredients that nonetheless don't significantly shift the musical axis the band had been pursuing. A hot fusion of jittery, syncopated post-punk, well tempered by melody, and songwriting that draws, in its sounds and arrangements, on the chamber minimalism dear to the likes of Clogs (the side project of Bryce Dessner and Padma Newsome). With this latter element increasingly taking the upper hand: airy, layered accompaniments (strings, keyboards and horns) that push the guitars into the shadows, full, solemn progressions, softer, less contrasted melodic lines, where Berninger's obsessive, velvety voice takes on an ever more sculptural presence and, for the first time, is occasionally doubled by faint echoes of a certain North American folk-pop choral tradition.
The opening "Terrible Love" plays on a filthy, angular, percussive guitar sound that assails and overwhelms the delicate acoustic harmony (guitar and piano) until it radicalizes into a kind of distorted centrifuge. Then the balance shifts toward a more rarefied, orchestral approach, with the guitars held in check and unsettling off-beats lurking in the background: "Sorrow", the hazy, syncopated apathy of "Little Faith", "Conversation 16", where choral streaks, keyboards and strings take over, the almost dark phantasmagoria of "Anyone's Ghost", "Bloodbuzz Ohio", which at first sounds just like "Apartment Story" but then grows more soliloquizing and melodramatic. All very polished, even if the element of surprise is perhaps missing. So much so that this time The National save their best for when they abandon any pop-wave pretense in favor of slower, semi-acoustic tracks (with the exception of the blurry, pretentious "England"): the chamber folk of "Runaway", a cross between Leonard Cohen and Sufjan Stevens (the horn and string patterns), the superb, swaying harmony of "Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks".
A conservative, transitional album, one that confirms the quality of The National's songwriting but adds nothing essential to an otherwise spotless discography.

The following Trouble Will Find Me (2013), far from being a misstep, nonetheless leaves open the question of just how long a band can keep riding its winning formulas before they start to feel predictable. A clear example is found in what begin life as the most interesting stylistic choices (synths, drum machines), but which end up functioning more as supplementary flourishes than as signs of a will to explore new horizons. What remains front and center are rhythmic and vocal constructions as indicative of the musicians' taste as they are evocative of déjà vu, starting with "Don't Swallow The Cap", the taster released online ahead of the album, which, along with "Graceless", belongs among those classic tiptoeing pop-wave gallops they could by now write in their sleep. And the fact that a certain weariness is starting to show through in The National's work is also proven by Matt Berninger's takes, perhaps never so subdued in his ventriloquism, and reluctant to attack the songs exactly where you'd feel the need for him to.
Worth highlighting in this regard is the helping hand of fellow travelers (Sufjan Stevens, St. Vincent, the ever-present Richard Reed Parry, and a Nona Marie Invie enjoying a well-deserved rise in status), brought in to freshen up the arrangements, and not by chance present in many of the most successful episodes, such as the pop-anthem "I Should Live In Salt", the loose-reined finale, à la "Terrible Love", of "Sea Of Love", or the spectral closing passage of strings and voices that splendidly seals "This Is The Last Time". The album, though without major peaks, holds its own with effective refrains even when one senses it's missing that last cent to make a dollar ("I got a trouble inside my skin/ I try to keep my skeletons in" in "Slipped", hard to resist).
Even more compelling is the closing one-two punch, in which, having shed the all-too-comfortable clothes they'd been wearing ("I Need My Girl"), the band first joins the kosmische musik revival party, entering through the back door but dressed in the right tuxedo ("Humiliation"), then turns its gaze to the America of their fathers, laying out a mid-tempo that cradles the memory of Levon Helm through the streets of Brooklyn ("Pink Rabbits"). It falls to "Hard To Find" to close things out in a deliberately understated solemnity, suspended in an ether of guitars and synths, before Bryan Devendorf's muffled footsteps step in to carry off the song and the album, though probably not all the doubts. The maturity shown by the band is evidence of excessive control, certainly rooted in a superior refinement, but one that, when paired with a band of this caliber, also smells of punches pulled. For now the gears keep turning, but there's a growing hope that one of the last stars of American pop-rock won't risk, in the long run, sitting back and resting on the laurels of its own greatness.

New horizons?

The National's foresight led them to reshuffle the deck and at least revisit the musical side of things on the following Sleep Well Beast. Released in September 2017, it's a record that speaks of relationships forever teetering between collapse and faint efforts to save them, of failed communication, of the need for a drink to drown one's problems in and find the strength to face them. But above all it's a record that marks a strong turning point, one that musically transforms The National's world: while still following the comfortable path already well laid out in the past, the band explores new expressive avenues, focusing on a use of electronics capable of lending tensions never heard before. It's the record The National had never made before, their most experimental, a kind of personal "Kid A" in light format, the act of discontinuity in which electronic undercurrents build an eclectic, unusual container for Matt Berninger's words, a new fresco of our times that doesn't shy away from flexing its muscles, starting with the second track, "Day I Die", just to confirm that, alongside the melodic atmospheres designed to break the listener's heart, The National also want to keep a "garage" soul alive. Berninger's lyrics, for all their apparent crypticism, tend to spell out the situation being told from the very first lines: in the majestic elegance of "Guilty Party", the perfect song, the instant classic of the album, the protagonist tries, without much conviction, to remedy a relationship that has entered a tired phase. The familiar points of view this time are pushed even further, since part of the lyrics were written four-handed by Matt and his wife Carin Besser, a writer and former New Yorker editor - a couple not in crisis who tried to imagine and give shape in verse to a marriage falling apart. The not-always-easy husband-wife dynamic is laid bare with that blend of melancholy and regret that is the band's unmistakable stylistic signature, and remains the concrete added value of an album that finds, in the balanced alternation between soft piano-centered ballads ("Born To Beg", the heart-wrenching love story "Dark Side Of The Gym") and electric ripples ("The System Only Dreams In Total Darkness" is the most successful, with drumming rigorously built on the toms), the strength to rise to the status of the band's new manifesto. Among the slower tracks, "Carin At The Liquor Store" stands out, a simultaneous tribute to his wife and to the inseparable bottle (anyone who's seen them live knows how true these words are). Matt, the wine, the wife, John Cheever, the piano sketching nocturnal scenes, that breathtaking voice. Not a single minute is wasted on this album.
In the opening lines of the touching "Empire Line" the reference to figures observed while sleeping returns, but this time the image - disarmingly delicate - is that of a father watching his son sleep in the car during a long journey. Children return in the spectral closing lullaby (the title track), built on the same synthetic bed as "Guilty Party", its wings artfully clipped so it can't take flight, left instead in a state of "dark semi-consciousness". The beast of the title - the band has explained - represents the future, our children who fall asleep at night leaving their fathers with that forest of questions to which The National offer no answers here. When the courage to face problems and the desire to solve them emerges ("Let's just get high enough to see our problems" sings Matt in "Day I Die"), a sense of real powerlessness echoes beneath the skin ("Nothing I change changes everything" in "Walk It Back"). The questions of a son who becomes a father, of a husband who becomes a victim of the longed-for stability, of a citizen who watches his city change every ten years, always finding it alive, the thrill of change that he himself doesn't want to give up, even if it's not easy for anyone to put an end to the warmth radiating from their own comfort zone (a family, one's home).
The National's reinvention also comes through an awareness of having grown up, of having become adults and parents ("Became a father when I was still a son" they sing in "Sleep Well Beast"), of wanting to evolve artistically without having to change completely. Every National record is, in its own way, a mirror of the times in which it was conceived: if a few years ago their songs expressed the post-9/11 fears of the average American, today the five of them can't help but materialize a stance that, in the middle of 2017, can only be anti-Trump. It's hard, for someone who has openly stood first alongside Obama and then in support of Hillary Clinton, to give up the role of one of the most "political" crooners of his generation, but once again Matt doesn't play it through populism for its own sake, but through signals to be decoded that work beneath the surface. The fact remains that when politics comes into play, The National respond by turning up the volume, engineering sudden surges that materialize in the electric fury of "Turtleneck", the hardest episode of the lot, in which Nels Cline becomes the model to emulate when things heat up. But there's no shortage of spirited moments on this album, running through the textbook crescendo of "I'll Still Destroy You" and the over-the-top guitars of "Day I Die" and "The System Only Dreams In Total Darkness". Elsewhere, imperious pianos and hushed, auteur-like brushstrokes help make sure much of the material still sounds familiar, comfortable, reassuring, caressing, which will let them keep every last one of their old fans. We are, then, in the presence of a renewal rooted in continuity: without needing to call on big-name producers, The National build from within a sound that becomes even "stronger" and more contemporary, a superb mix carved into twelve tracks that we'll remember fondly even many years from now, fitting perfectly alongside the classics "Alligator", "Boxer" and "High Violet". The National are by now a band that resembles only itself, standard-bearers of that "ill-mannered" romanticism in which they're always ready to apologize, under their breath, in a manner that has belonged, for years, to them and them alone. We breathe every day, and we sift through the web, hoping to discover songs like these. And sometimes we fall hopelessly in love with them.

Being constantly "out of fashion", and hardly cover-boy material, while carefully avoiding writing any potential mass hits (though perhaps "Mistaken For Strangers" or "Bloodbuzz Ohio" could have been?) has allowed The National to sidestep all that hype which, over the last twenty years, has led to the premature decline of so many contemporary bands. Sticking to a path devoted to research and perfectionism has led the Ohio quintet to define a bold new shared project with Mike Mills, director of the touching short film "I Am Easy To Find", starring Alicia Vikander (Academy Award winner for Best Supporting Actress in 2016 for "The Danish Girl"), an essential part of this artistic step. Mills is also co-producer (and in a small part co-writer) of the American band's eighth album, over an hour of music, sixteen tracks, some of which had been left off previous tracklists, the most elaborate and collaborative project The National have ever made, the first time they've been willing to let someone into the creative process so thoroughly.

I Am Easy To Find, the album, was released on 4AD on May 17, 2019, enriched by a parterre of female voices who, besides lending grace and voicing the woman's point of view in the lyrics, provide a welcome discontinuity to songs that might otherwise have risked sounding monotonous. Gail Ann Dorsey (for years backing vocalist and bassist for David Bowie), Sharon Van Etten, the Irish Lisa Hannigan, the English Kate Stables, the French Mina Tindle (Bryce Dessner's wife) and Eve Owen share Berninger's baritone across the verses of these unprecedented adult contemporary ballads, conceived with a taste somewhere between the confessional and the avant-garde, where piano (the title track, the excellent closer "Light Years") and lush string arrangements ("Quiet Light") dominate above all. The guitars take a step back, serving as tools for embroidery and embellishment, to the point that the more rhythmic episodes are reduced to a couple, almost entirely lacking those ripples that injected energy into all previous records ("Turtleneck" is already a distant memory), present here only in the ethnic-flavored percussion of "Where Is Her Head" and in the already familiar "Rylan", dating back to the "High Violet" sessions, from which it borrows its general atmosphere, one of the tracks that longtime fans of the band will like most. From a strictly musical standpoint, the risk is one of folding in on itself, in a slo-core minimalism always on the verge of seeming tedious to a distracted listen. The compositional choices range from a chamber-music approach (the opening of "Hey Rosey"), a product of the Dessner twins' classical training, to Radiohead-esque deconstructivist flourishes (the treated, fragmented guitar that opens "You Had Your Soul With You") already present on "Sleep Well Beast". But where the record from two years earlier presented itself as openly experimental, breaking the monotony of "Trouble Will Find Me" and venturing toward new stylistic horizons, "I Am Easy To Find" settles into more "classic" territory, even letting a spiritual, sacred edge emerge in the choral parts (performed by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus) inserted at the end of "Oblivions", at the start of the instrumental "Dust Swirls In Strange Light" and in the brief interludes "Her Father In The Pool" and "Underwater".
With The National, though, any discussion can never set aside the lyrics: from odes to relationship crises (which return in "Quiet Life") to the relentless march of advancing time (the thematic core of the short film), all the way to the memorable streams of consciousness that mark "The Pull Of You" (where Berninger's best vocal surge stands out) and "Not In Kansas" (the album's high point, on the loss of one's own roots), Matt and his wife Carin keep writing the everyday primer of twenty-first-century America. Between nods to R.E.M., The Strokes and Patti Smith, I Am Easy To Find thus succeeds in authoritatively consolidating the band's reputation and style, reinforcing a trademark that now identifies an utterly recognizable aesthetic. The National are certainly no strangers to connections with the world of cinema, but this time the project can truly be called complete. The power of the images in Mills' rigorous black and white, and his point of view in producing the songs, allowed the album and the short film to intersect and symbiotically influence one another: the songs have a cinematic unfolding with tremendous evocative power, while the film becomes even more melancholy and moving thanks to a soundtrack so sweet and so sorrowful. Lyrics, music and cinematic adaptation together achieve a combined result that none of them could have reached on their own. Sticking instead to a mere analysis of the sixteen tracks that make up the record, the elegance, class and delicacy of many passages are beyond question. Everything feels comfortably familiar, almost too much so, and this turns out to be the band's only venial sin: an abrupt return to the "traditional" after the bold change of perspective brought about by "Sleep Well Beast". Their way of continuing — in some sense — to surprise us.

Matt goes solo

More than twenty years after the band's debut, 2020 brings Serpentine Prisoner, Matt Berninger's solo debut. Actually, a semi-solo outing (alongside the far less famous Brent Knopf of Menomena) had already taken place five years earlier under the name El Vy. Used to imagining Berninger's voice and The National's sophisticated chamber-rock working in unison, it was hard to picture this record straying, at least in part, so far from the band's sound. In fact, the first two tracks find the songwriter not venturing too far from his comfort zone, first with a brief, delicate reflection on love carried by piano and languid guitars ("My Eyes Are T-Shirt"), then with a track that starts out limping before building into something more insistent, sounding as if it could have come off "Trouble Will Find Me" ("Distant Axis"). It's from the following "One More Second" that Berninger's choice to entrust his words to the care of a producer as significant as Booker T. Jones, coming from a Memphis so distant from The National's idea of music, starts to take shape and proves immediately apt. On one hand there's the usual Berninger-esque confession, this time delivered in the imploring tone of a lover who must convince his beloved of the sincerity of his intentions (⟦Q1⟧), on the other the usual understated opening of the instrumental arrangement gradually fills out with nuance and fullness: vintage keyboard solos, a grandiloquent organ filling out verses that grow ever more turbulent, the clattering details of the guitars, the darting piano. A triumph of warm, almost unexpected sounds that, released as a single, made our ears prick up and raised our expectations. The other single too, the title track placed at the close, though more drawn-out, employs the same dynamics and the synthesizers so dear to Jones.
Even richer and more unexpected is the blues-western turn taken by the musical fabric of "Loved So Little", which, amid the pronounced stumbling of the guitar and sandy harmonicas, tells its devilish story like the Nick Cave of "The Red Right Hand" — albeit with a less rumpled suit and a less pronounced passion for the devil.
Hair-tearing love takes centre stage again in the mournful "Take Me Out Of Town", embellished at its emotional peak by a breeze drawn by the horns, while it's strings brimming with grief that mark the most poignant moments of "Collar Of Your Shirt", nonetheless traversed by the recurring, delightful retro keyboards throughout.
Among the more à-la-National moments, nonetheless important to the balance of a tracklist whose strength lies in alternating novelty and reassurance, there's certainly the duet with Gail Ann Dorsey (a "Silver Springs" that could have been included on "I Am Easy To Find") and the orchestrally reinforced piano ballad "All For Nothing". A multifaceted personality, romanticism, a willingness to take risks, to take itself seriously one minute and undercut itself the next, combined with a maniacal attention to detail, extending from the music to the cover portrait (did you notice the shadow of the moccasin?), mark the solo triumph of a frontman who once again proves his uniqueness and his undeniable importance within the hierarchy of his band.

The twin albums

In April 2023 the full band released their ninth record, First Two Pages Of Frankenstein, eleven songs that bring The National's attitude back ten years, not only erasing the stimulating novelty brought by the electronic additions that animated the excellent "Sleep Well Beast", but also scaling back the multidisciplinary breadth expressed by the more sprawling "I Am Easy To Find", resulting, from a strictly musical point of view, in a band that is too reassuring, too controlled, with nothing adventurous left to offer, unwilling to take any risks. The experimentation is left at the door, reserved instead for the works (solo and in collaboration) produced by the twins Bryce and Aaron Dessner, who in recent years have moved deftly between avant-garde research, film scores and blockbusters for superstar Taylor Swift. She in turn returns the favour by lending her voice to "The Alcott", just as Sufjan Stevens leaves his mark on the evocative "Once Upon A Poolside" (applause) and Phoebe Bridgers on "This Isn't Helping" and "Your Mind Is Not Your Friend". Duets — it must be said — that are not very intrusive, designed so that every song still remains unmistakably a National song.
The tracks that break up the work's monochrome tone are "Tropic Morning News" and "Grease In Your Hair", the only real diversions in a project that otherwise stays anchored in soft, melancholy, minimalist chamber-pop territory. Doled out over several months (some tracks were already on the setlist during the previous summer's tour), First Two Pages Of Frankenstein is the record with the most troubled gestation in the now long artistic journey of the Cincinnati quintet, a project built with great difficulty, dodging writer's block, depression and the attachment to the bottle that have marked Matt Berninger's recent life. They were reportedly on the verge of breaking up, but thanks to the free outlet provided by their individual solo careers, The National are back again, having survived, to tell us new stories, without too many jolts, with the occasional yawn but never really faltering.

Just five months later comes Laugh Track, announced with barely a couple of days' notice. The two songs released a few weeks earlier, "Alphabet City" and "Space Invader", mostly suggested the imminent arrival of a deluxe edition of "Frankenstein", but instead The National's compositional bulimia delivers to streaming platforms worldwide a twin album, Laugh Track — like the canned laughter used on TV shows — a record even longer than its predecessor, with material conceived almost entirely during the same sessions, and a cover that reinforces the mirroring between the two. On a first listen, perhaps not too focused, Laugh Track could be perceived as yet another new National record nobody felt the need for. The ingredients are comfortably kneaded together in their usual fashion, giving rise to songs that tend to feel like carbon copies of others written in the past, and indeed tracks like "Turn Off The House" or "Tour Manager", but also the livelier "Deep End", feel as though we've already heard them dozens of times on the quintet's earlier records.
But looking more closely inside these twelve new compositions, there are quite a few elements capable of making an impression. The nervous instrumental tail of "Space Invader" (we already knew it, but immersed within "Laugh Track" it makes even more sense), the boundless elegance of "Hornets", and even more so, right at the finish line, as if promising unprecedented future scenarios, the most surprising seven-plus minutes, contained within "Smoke Detector", a surge with an unmistakable alt-rock flavour (I've chosen to avoid writing post-punk). Sounds that finally shake things up, sounds very rarely heard on a National track, which substantially change the meaning of the whole album. It was the last track written for this record, born out of a particularly productive sound check and shaped on the road during the recent tour. The existence of "Smoke Detector" gave purpose to the goal of gathering under one roof whatever had been left unused from the "Frankenstein" sessions, polishing it up without smoothing it over too much, joining it with the duets with Rosanne Cash ("Crumble") and Phoebe Bridgers (the title track), and giving a new chance to "Weird Goodbyes", the single with Bon Iver released in the summer of 2022. "Laugh Track", together with "Frankenstein", forms an effective combo that won't clutter the setlists of the next tour but will make them harder to predict.

In December 2024, the concert The National performed on June 3 of that year at the Cavea of Rome's Auditorium Parco della Musica became an official live album. Rome captures a decidedly vibrant snapshot, marked by guitars that cut through far more sharply than they do in the band's studio performances. Just listen to "Tropic Morning News" or the furious "Smoke Detector" to understand how much the Dessner brothers (between a film score, an excursion into minimalist modern classical and a new idea to share with Swift) push on their respective six-strings and crank up the gain on their distortion pedals to create a sound far rawer, far more "rock" than usual. All topped off by the horn flourishes (played by Ben Lanz and Kyle Resnick) and a rhythm section (the ever-reliable Devendorf duo) that, as always, serves the band's three most celebrated members.
Rome presents itself as one of the many possible best-ofs the band could compile, with a sequence of fan favourites ("Don't Swallow The Cap", "Bloodbuzz Ohio", "Graceless") alternating with selections from the two albums released during 2023, "First Two Pages Of Frankenstein" and "Laugh Track", which gain a great deal in their live transposition. A few tracks performed that evening in Rome are left out, but "Conversation 16", "Deep End", "Day I Die", "Space Invader" and "About Today" are included on a special edition reserved for the fan club. Electricity and introversion follow one another relentlessly, between a sip of wine and an anti-Meloni sign, and, as per the best of traditions, the epilogue is entrusted to the classic "Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks", sung in unison by the audience and the unmiked band, accompanied only by acoustic instrumentation. These are the last shivers, arriving after the frantic chase of "Mr November" and the enveloping coils of "Terrible Love".

What The National have set to music over twenty-five years of career is refined poetry, melancholy visions scratched by those jolts that let post-punk influences nurtured in their youth surface. A youth undermined by the passing of time, by relationships shattered, by a strong sense of inadequacy, by a subtle malaise that sinks into alcohol and the loneliness of an alienating urban landscape. While an ever-growing core of detractors accuses them of sounding monotonous, the five musicians from Ohio have always answered by coming up with no shortage of surprising moves.
Like when, in 2007, they commanded international attention with an album, "Boxer", and a single, "Mistaken For Strangers", that set the standard throughout the 2000s; like when, in 2017, with "Sleep Well Beast", they proved capable of infusing their poetics with the contemporaneity of electronic sounds; like when they branched out into a thousand solo directions, ranging across film scores, chamber minimalism and adult songwriting; like when they became fiercely sought-after collaborators even for the most acclaimed stars, such as Taylor Swift, who won over the indie circuit thanks to the double release of "Folklore" / "Evermore".

In 2025, Matt Berninger releases his second solo record, Get Sunk. While his bandmates' other outings — Big Red Machine, the compositions of Bryce Dessner, Pfarmers, LNZNDRF — are more distant from or more disguised compared to The National, what Matt Berninger writes under his own name (with the EL VY parenthesis now closed) is similar to what the five musicians from Cincinnati produce. So much so that one is tempted to ask why he didn't just release it as a new National album. "Serpentine Prison" (2020), thanks to Booker T. Jones' production, sounded more classic, more chamber-like. The new "Get Sunk", whose first songs took shape shortly after his solo debut, is in line with The National: both lyrically and sonically. Is that a bad thing? Fortunately not. It's another page of a book we now know well: a melancholy work, verging on depression, in which the author doesn't overturn anything, yet moves with absolute mastery, rich in detail. States of mind that Berninger knows and recounts in a unique way. Close on the heels of "First Two Pages Of Frankenstein", he even shared them with Dave Letterman. Not forgetting his genuine, redeeming irony: for "Get Sunk" — produced by Sean O'Brien — just look at the video for "No Love", one of the lightest moments of the listen along with "Junk". The quavering opening of "Inland Ocean", with its female choruses, recalls "I Am Easy To Find". Then Matt loses himself on a journey, with words that paint the record's emotional landscape. On every page/track, Berninger doles out a bit of soul, just enough to make the songs feel alive and genuine. Whether in the more rousing moments (the surprising energy of "Bonnet Of Pins", complete with a proto-live surge at the end), or in the more sorrowful ones ("Breaking Into Acting", where he duets with Hand Habits). Within this distilled soul, magnificently arranged and performed (listen to the horns on "Frozen Oranges"), "Little By Little" remains the standout track: a song that, in terms of pathos, wouldn't look out of place among The National's sad hits. The most interesting track, though, is the cinematic 1980s-style spoken-word/crooner piece "Nowhere Special". And once past the urban clamour of "Silver Jeep", when, in the closing surge of "Times of Difficulty", Berninger sings like a slogan ⟦Q2⟧, you get the sense the author has finally made peace with something that had been holding him back.

After taking part in Anna Calvi's "Is This All There Is?", a year after "Get Sunk", Matt Berninger opens Type It Up, his EP, with an angry, booze-soaked prayer. "Martini Me Fatso" was born — like other tracks on the new release — on tour, with contributions from his comrades-in-arms on this solo adventure: Julia Laws on keyboards and backing vocals, drummer Sterling Laws, Garrett Lang on bass, and above all guitarist and producer Sean O'Brien, already at the console for his second solo record. Driving and seasoned with the usual irony, "Martini Me Fatso" is built around Monica. For anyone wondering about the meaning of the chorus, Monica is the harmonica that gives the track by The National's singer its extra flourish. Riding that same wave of inspiration and vitality, immediately captured in the studio, there's also "Ask For Water". With more sorrowful shadings and lyrics in pure Berninger style, the track flaunts a tense, electric chorus, culminating in the closing solo. Having already paid tribute to them on "First Two Pages Of Frankenstein" with "New Order T-Shirt", Sumner's band continues to be celebrated here with a cover of "Blue Monday". A rock version already performed live in 2025, which accompanied the band on tour until just a few months ago. "Type It Up", on the other hand, was called "Invisible Jerk" and "Black Letter Font" in its earliest live performances. It opens with the light/dark brushstrokes typical of Berninger's songwriting and gives us the EP's most anguished track. Closing the EP is a cover of Velvet Underground's "Who Loves The Sun", recorded for the TV series "Sunny Nights". Here Berninger doesn't overturn the original, restoring its freshness, and duets with Rosanne Cash. It's not the first time our man has tackled a song by Lou Reed's band, and this time he calls on a legend of American country music already tapped to enhance "Crumble" on "Laugh Track". For those who don't want to miss a thing, the vinyl edition also includes the "Acoustic Live In Australia" version of "Martini Me Fatso".

Contributions by Alessio Belli ("Get Sunk" and "Type It Up"), Andrea D'Addato ("Trouble Will Find Me") and Michele Corrado ("Serpentine Prisoner")

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google