The National

Trouble, it seems, finally found THE NATIONAL. Existential bouts of writer’s block, insecurity and depression – exacerbated during the darkest days of the pandemic – called into question the band’s very future. Could they overcome their anxieties and find new ways to reconnect with each other? Would their often tense relationships survive? With a brilliant new album due for release this month, they tell Laura Barton, “Sometimes this intensely intimate relationship feels like a riddle that nobody can solve.”

The National at Long Pond studios, 2023: (l-r)Bryce Dessner, Scott Devendorf, Bryan Devendorf, Matt Berninger and Aaron Dessner

Photo by JOSH GOLEMAN

WEDNESDAY, the first day of March, and Hudson in upstate New York, lies quiet and still. The antique shops shuttered, the grill bar empty. Snow piles on the rooftops, and a lone car motors up Warren Street. Malcolm Gladwell sips coffee in the café on the square.

A short drive from here, past the fruit farms and the frozen fields, the five members of The National are rehearsing material from their ninth album, First Two Pages Of Frankenstein. Amid the assemblage of keyboards, guitars and drums, Matt Berninger sits on a blue ergonomic stool, behind him a view of the long, snow-covered pond that gave this studio space its name.

It has been a difficult couple of years for the singer; a long, mute season in which the days grew disconnected and he found himself unable to write. “Usually when I’m in a troubled place, I can make something out of it, and write a song about it, and that does a lot to solve it,” he says. “This time, I didn’t want to. I was uninterested in my own grief. I was uninterested in my own problems. I was maybe even a little embarrassed by it.”

He stopped drinking, stopped smoking weed, commenced a course of antidepressants. But nothing seemed to help. Far away, his bandmates wondered how to reach him, how to reconfigure The National to work again. “It’s this intensely intimate relationship between five people and it’s complex,” says Aaron Dessner. “Sometimes it feels like a riddle that nobody can solve. But weirdly, the beauty of the music meant we found a way through. This record is really powerful because of it.”

It is now a delicate moment in the release of the album: this week alone brings a visit from Uncut, a turn on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and a special performance at Bearsville Theater in Woodstock. It will be a chance to try out songs, but also an opportunity to discuss the events of the last few years, when one of the world’s most beloved bands came the closest they have ever come to falling apart.

It has been four years since The National released a record. The touring of 2019’s ambitious, multi-voiced I Am Easy To Find gave way to the early days of the pandemic; dates were rescheduled and duly rescheduled again, and in the interim, the band members occupied themselves with individual projects: Berninger worked on a solo album, Serpentine Prison; Bryan and Scott Devendorf, the brothers who make up the band’s rhythm section, joined longtime touring member Ben Lanz to release new material as LNZNDRF. Bryce Dessner focused on classical composition and several film scores, created in collaboration with his twin brother, Aaron.

Talk show men: The National appear on Jimmy Fallon, March 3, 2023

TODDOWYOUNG/NBC VIA GETTY IMAGES

Collaborators: Phoebe Bridgers,

and SufjanStevens

Pauline deLassusSaint-Genies(withhusband Bryce Dessner)

Taylor Swift

But it is Aaron for whom the last four years have been most transformative – at least in the public perception. Alongside his work with The National, he had long produced other artists, including Sharon Van Etten, Lisa Hannigan and Ben Howard. But his role helming Taylor Swift’s phenomenally successful lockdown albums Folklore and Evermore sprung him into the world of uber-producer, a flurry of artists suddenly now eager to record with him at Long Pond. In the week we meet, Aaron is announced as the producer and co-writer of Ed Sheeran’s fifth record, – (Subtract).

In one light, The National now return a band gilded by popstar association, although since their earliest days external forces have played a crucial part in the band’s process and identity. The National operate less as a simple five-piece, and more as a kind of constellatory configuration. At any one time they can draw on the talents of their circle – Justin Vernon, say, or Van Etten, or This Is The Kit. On I Am Easy to Find, they enlisted the director Mike Mills as a creative collaborator. For …Frankenstein, contributors include Swift, Sufjan Stevens and Phoebe Bridgers. There are several mainstays: the writer Carin Besser, also Berninger’s wife, co-creates many of the band’s lyrics; the French singer Pauline de Lassus Saint-Geniès, aka Mina Tindle, who is married to Bryce Dessner, often provides additional vocals. “They’re a really great ecosystem,” says This Is The Kit’s Kate Stables, who sang on I Am Easy To Find, and has supported the band on several tours. “They’re thoughtful and generous and a community.”

The striking thing about The National’s return is not so much the fanfare of celebrity affiliation, or the flush of new collaboration, but the quiet consolidation of the band’s core; a response to the disparate days of the pandemic, but also to a series of events that shook their band. To spend time with them now is to find its members recalibrated, grateful for one another and the opportunity to carry on playing music, buoyed by a collection of new songs that stand among the finest of their career.