Here’s a handy tag cloud of adjectives the National have no doubt grown to despise: Restrained, controlled, intimate, slow-burning, patient, grand. No doubt, too, that their live shows can feel like frantic exorcisms of all of these respectable, middlebrow signifiers: Onstage, Matt Berninger is a kind of yuppie Dionysus, downing bottles of red wine, tearing at his collar, pushing through the crowd, shouting off-mic. The contrast between the two versions of himself, the staid crooner and the wild-eyed rocker, felt like the band’s ace in the hole: It meant they could play stadiums and soundtrack scenes of snow falling in sedate indie films about unhappy New England families.
Sleep Well Beast is their seventh album, and their first attempt at inviting some of that disruptive energy into the studio. Making records with this band has sometimes sounded about as fun as a forced-bonding office retreat, but this time they built a studio in a pastoral area of upstate New York that muted intraband creative friction. As Berninger memorably put it, “It’s hard to be a dick when you look out the window and there’s this tranquil pond.” As a result, Sleep Well Beast quakes and shivers with all kinds of un-National sounds—barbed, intentionally sloppy guitar attacks, drum loops, bits of digital crunch and splatter, and a rawer, more abandoned performance from Berninger. They don’t reinvent the band’s image so much as carefully muss its hair a bit, unfasten one more button on its shirt collar. They are still a good dinner-party band, but now they’ve made the album for when the wine starts spilling on the rug, the tablecloth is rumpled, the music has imperceptibly gotten louder, and all those friendly conversations have turned a little too heated.
The first single “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness” was a bit of a shot across the bow. The song introduces itself with a series of stray-hair noises—a steely guitar line, a frosty choir of “oohing” voices, a boxy drum loop, and an imperious grand piano airlifted from U2’s “New Year’s Day.” It forms an intriguing mist, but as you squint into it, familiar shapes emerge: The major-key chorus arrives with the same effortlessness as all their best songs, with that glinting phalanx of horns pushing it quietly forward. These are National Songs, made with the sounds and feelings that should be poured into the making of a National album. Some of the eccentricities and raw touches left at the edges feel like wind resistance tacked onto a beveled-smooth vehicle after the fact.
The same trick happens at the beginning of “I’ll Still Destroy You”: With a fluttering piece of drum programming and some mallet percussion, we are given a convincing twenty-second impression of a Björk song, circa Homogenic maybe. Then the swaying chords, the murmuring piano, and Berninger’s rumbling voice enters, dispelling the illusion and planting us back in the dimly lit auditorium on the cover of Boxer. The song kicks up again on its way out, with a wild, chaotic build that careens directly into “Guilty Party.” These controlled breakouts, bookending the otherwise-dependable pleasures of their music, provide a neat analog for the bits of craven irresponsibility and abandon you cling to in the margins of an otherwise stable existence—the occasional 2am-Tuesday, the weekend away from the kids. This has always been, and remains, Berninger’s character: “Let’s just get high enough to see our problems,” he pleads on “Day I Die.”
The wildest he allows himself to be, and maybe the wildest the band’s ever sounded, is “Turtleneck,” a mid-album cut that veers startlingly close to “National rave-up.” Berninger pitches his vocals at a ragged shout. It’s a political rocker, sardonic and full of withering asides like, “Light the water, check for lead.” “The poor, they leave their cell phones in the bathrooms of the rich,” he mutters, a lyric he’s explained refers to Trump venting typo-ridden tweets to the nation from his toilet-bowl throne. The song melts open into a pair of squealing, squiggled guitar solos that wouldn’t feel out of place on a latter-day Pearl Jam album, and Berninger moves in fitful circles around the kind of earnest activism that Vedder has practiced for years.
Like Vedder, or James Murphy, or really any rock singer wringing drama from their own limitations, Berninger remains the marquee character in the National’s music. He’s the guy the spotlight follows, and the band—as limber and powerful as the Dessner and Devendorf brothers are—serve mostly just to set the scene for Berninger to mutter intelligent, self-deprecating things into strange and counterintuitive rhythmic pockets of the songs. He wrote a lot of these lyrics alongside his wife Carin Besser and possesses an unerring ability to zero in on the bits of conversation that signify a lifelong coupledom: “I only take up a little of the collapsing space/I better cut this off, don’t want to fuck it up,” he repeats to himself on “Walk It Back,” a pitch-perfect evocation of trying to talk yourself out of having the same fight with the same person again, likely with the same results. “You keep saying so many things that I wish you won’t,” from “Empire Line,” is a sort of “I-don’t-want the-kids-to-hear-us” version of “shut up, goddamnit,” the version you offer when years of mutual respect have supplied the brakes to your worst impulses.
But perhaps the most resonant lyrics here speak to the band’s persistence and the durability of any long-term union. “Nothing I do/Makes me feel different,” he confesses on “I’ll Still Destroy You.” “Forget it/Nothing I change changes anything,” he offers on “Walk It Back.” Like R.E.M., whose ongoing existence became its own kind of raison d’être as they aged, the National offer testimony to something we don’t often celebrate: Enduring is a superpower of its own. The fact that no one can talk about the National without invoking their dependability might feel a bit unfair to them, or at least a bit tired. And yet, there’s a reason it remains such a dominating lens through which to examine them. Consistency is not boring. Consistency is a miracle, a small act of defiance against entropy. Berninger has compared the band to a marriage, as all band members do, but their music feels particularly devoted to the quotidian nature of lifelong unions, the way that your success is measured in time, how each year together turns your commitment into its own kind of monument. There’s a reason anniversary cards say things like “All these years later, I still love you.” It’s because the miracle isn’t in the “love,” it’s in the “still.”
