Most people attribute the National’s escalating popularity to their reliability: They write songs about existential dread and the real pressures that result when others are depending on you to have your shit together. And while that steadiness is certainly important, it gives short shrift to how the Brooklyn-via-Cincinnati band’s career fulfills a fantasy. Though their self-titled 2001 debut is all but written out of their history, every National album since has been more ambitious, accomplished, and successful than the one that came before it. They are strivers, and their place in the indie rock world suggests that life can be a series of upward promotions and self-improvement. But hard work is often a cover for repressed frustration, as was clear on 2010’s High Violet, an album whose wrought arrangements and violent lyrics underscored every story about what a tremendous pain in the ass it was to make. The question they ask on Trouble Will Find Me is both relatable and fantastical: When do we get a break from shooting up the ladder?
The National may find it impossible ever to relax, but they have learned to stop struggling on Trouble Will Find Me, their leanest and most aerodynamic record yet. Most descriptors of the National’s musicianship—the exacting performances, Matt Berninger’s oaken baritone, the allegiances with the equally finicky St. Vincent and Sufjan Stevens—can double as evidence for self-serving arguments about how they’re “boring.” The only term that’s dogged the National more than that one is “grower,” a slightly backhanded remark implying that enjoying them requires an inordinate investment, or that it’s more cerebral than physical. While the National never lacked confidence or craft, Trouble is an easily accessible and self-assured work, largely because it focuses on the visceral power of Berninger’s vocals and Bryan Devendorf’s inventive drumming. It’s a sign of trust that they can convey all of their ornate and rich melancholy without every sad note being underlined by a bassoon.
It’s been eight years since Berninger screamed on record, and now that act appears to have served as some kind of exfoliant. (He also quit smoking in 2011.) His vocals are deeper and richer than ever, as well as more tuneful and elegant. The National’s dirty secret is that for all of the Dessner brothers’ orchestral ambitions, these songs are simple things: Instantly memorable melodies and minimal chord progressions become familiar after one listen, and then there’s a pivot, usually undetectable the first time around, that takes the National towards one of their proprietary grand finales. The greatness lies in when the listener connects the two and realizes they're part of the same song.
“Graceless” perfects the kind of fist-pumping victory lap featured on “Abel” or “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” and subsequent spins reveal how expertly the build is structured. Ditto for “Sea of Love,” which incrementally wells up to a cathartic call and response that extends a hand to a slipping friend with both empathy (“tell me how to reach you”) and dark humor (“what did Harvard teach you?”). There are plenty of great little moments as well; the fractious time signatures of “I Should Live In Salt” and “Demons” pushing against Berninger’s burly vocals, a tiny, chromatic guitar figure setting “Humiliation” on a new trajectory, “I Need My Girl” expressing its nervy claustrophobia through frilly filigrees. You never lose sight of Trouble Will Find Me being the result of a meticulous process conducted by professionals, though like surgeons, chefs, or interior decorators, they trust themselves to know when to put the tools down.
That’s mostly true of Berninger’s lyrics as well. Trouble Will Find Me doesn't contain his sharpest writing—in particular, “Fireproof” and “Slipped” cross over to being a bit pro forma—but in ditching the obtuse metaphors and playing with and against type, it’s his funniest. “I am secretly in love with everyone I grew up with,” he gravely intones on “Demons,” hinting at the dominant theme of how the self-image and relationships formed during his younger, angsty years figure in to his present reality. He brings the stakes down to a tangible level, where he’s invited to nice dinners, punk parties, and meet-and-greets, only to wind up calling his wife, feeling like his presence there is all somehow a giant mistake. “When I walk into a room, I do not light it up... FUCK,” Berninger stresses in an exasperated tone as a minor chord inversion takes away the mock scare quotes during the final chorus of “Demons,” revealing the deep-set despair at the source of all this self-deprecation.
As usual, he’s not alone on Trouble Will Find Me. Within this elemental music, compulsions towards substances, sex, and depression are likened to swamps, oceans, and agricultural decay— natural events tentatively contained by human will. The characters are medicated, missing, and incapable of justifying their hangovers, let alone glorifying them. On Alligator, Berninger’s sociopathic tendencies felt defiant, and some may miss that; during “All the Wine,” he drank from bottomless goblets, claiming “God is on my side.” Conversely, the narrators of Trouble Will Find Me are creatures of habit attending to dull aches; a perfunctory anti-romance is consecrated with “Tylenol and beer,” and by the next song, Berninger mutters, “God loves everybody, don’t remind me.” Where he once fancied himself a cold-blooded heat-seeker and a “birthday candle in a circle of black girls,” the isolation he now feels renders him as unique as “a white girl in a crowd of white girls in a park.”
Considering the National can no longer be compared to anyone besides themselves, it’s fitting Trouble Will Find Me is their most self-referential album. Sometimes, they’re alluding to their image as the definitive yuppie band: Berninger calls himself “a 45 percenter,” “a television version of a person with a broken heart.” They’re also putting their own work up against the canon because they’re big enough to do it: Let It Be and Nevermind serve as paragons of stability on “Don’t Swallow the Cap,” Elliott Smith’s despondent “Needle in the Hay” contrasts with the pokerfaced “Fireproof”. Bona Drag plays during the luxurious piano mope of “Pink Rabbits,” LA Woman and Guns N’ Roses are given malaprop name-checks on “Humiliation.”
Of all the references, the most powerful serves as the final line on Trouble Will Find Me: “they can all just kiss off into the air.” On a song which bemoans the futility of living in the past, here’s a band often mocked for aging with their music quoting a band often mocked for music that’s stuck in a permanent state of teenhood. It could be the funniest or the most heartbreaking moment on a record full of instances of both, a reminder that when Berninger sings “I was trying not to crack up” on the previous song, there’s two ways of reading it. On a similar topic, Ezra Koenig recently opined, “Wisdom’s a gift, but you’d trade it for youth,” and “Hard to Find” is a similar thought taken from a different angle. People stay down with their demons wishing for that trade to be a realistic possibility, and in the clearest terms his medium-sized American heart can muster, Berninger expresses his means of finding serenity when trouble tries to find him—“There’s a lot that I’ve not forgotten/But I let go of other things.” As a culmination and refinement of everything the National have done over the past decade, Trouble Will Find Me couldn’t be granted a more fitting mission statement.
