Shortly after the release of his first solo album, 2020’s Serpentine Prison, Matt Berninger fell into a depression so deep that he could neither write nor sing. Having spent two decades detailing smoke-thick melancholy as the lead singer of The National, the sudden inability to articulate this all-consuming darkness was debilitating. On The National’s twin 2023 albums, Laugh Track and First Two Pages of Frankenstein, he confronted that year in paralysis head-on. Now, on his second solo album, Get Sunk, he seems determined to leave that bleak period behind him for good. But his more positive outlook comes at the expense of the rich detail and self-analysis that brings Berninger’s work with The National to life.
From the outset, Berninger gestures at epiphanies without exploring them. Opener “Inland Ocean” builds around a tremolo guitar with little flourishes of wind and strings as Berninger sings about something imprecise: “Lost cause, I have no emotions.” A pared-down choir returns to that line as though it’s a mantra, but the lyric is so vague that it comes off less as profundity and more as a stray thought. The same is true on the following track, “No Love,” where Berninger sketches the feeling of a location but never returns to shade in the empty spaces. “This place has a sinking feeling/The energy's so strange,” he sings, “It doesn't have anything to do with anything/The vibes aren't right.” Major chords and uncluttered mixes undercut any uneasiness those lines might have conjured.
These songs lack Berninger’s gift for rendering the mundane dramatic. Take “Once Upon a Poolside” from First Two Pages of Frankenstein, the first song he wrote after that debilitating bout of writer’s block. There, too, he’s disoriented—“What was the worried thing you said to me?” he asks in the stark chorus—but he fights through to find some poetry in his senses: the smell of sweet perfume, planes sinking into sidewalks, a panic attack in super slow-motion. All that Berninger evokes at the top of Get Sunk is the slow-motion.
There are moments of intrigue on Get Sunk, not least the two duets. “Breaking Into Acting” features Meg Duffy of Hand Habits, while Julia Laws, a.k.a. Ronboy, adds minimal melodies on “Silver Jeep.” Their voices are a welcome reminder of a world outside Berninger’s mind, and his lyrics open up as a result. In the intriguing little scraps of detail on the latter song—“I gotta get a message to you without signals/AC motor puts me right to sleep/I dream of dreaming and grind my teeth”—Berninger finally attempts to express the inexpressible, rather than simply acknowledging it and letting it go. His sonorous, croaking baritone feels weightier when tied to Laws’ airy harmonies.
Berninger wrote a handful of these songs before his depression took hold, but when he started work on the album in earnest he went back, rewrote lyrics, and re-recorded vocals, reasoning that he had to say something new with his rediscovered voice. But still, Get Sunk often feels as though it stalled out after the first draft. The rhythms on “Frozen Oranges” and “Nowhere Special,” for example, don’t quite fit, as though they’ve been read directly from a stream-of-consciousness journal entry.
The closer, “Times of Difficulty,” reverses this pattern. Like “Inland Ocean,” it’s rooted in major chords and adheres to an ultra-simple structure, but it feels folkier and more organic. It even has a mantra worth repeating: “In times of heartache, get drunk/In times of tears, get sunk” may not be sound advice on its face, but there’s an endearing old-world charm to it. As a standalone song, “Times of Difficulty” is the best from either of Berninger’s two solo albums so far. Although it would be a fitting closer to an album of vivid self-reflection, at the back end of Get Sunk, its wisdom feels unearned.
Berninger’s reputation as the sad dad of indie rock is well earned, but it was never the melancholy itself that made his work compelling—it was his eye for detail, instinct for fragmented poetry, and dry sense of humor. It would have been fascinating to see him apply those gifts more fully to writing about life as he searches for peace in middle age and refinds his voice after falling silent. Instead, Get Sunk feels like a missed opportunity.
