Last fall, the National débuted a new piece of merchandise: a black zippered sweatshirt featuring the words “SAD DADS” in block letters. The band—which formed in 1999, in Brooklyn—was lampooning its reputation as a font of midlife ennui, the sort of rudderless melancholy that takes hold when a person realizes that the dusty hallmarks of American happiness (marriage, children, a job in an office) aren’t a guarantee against despair. For more than two decades, this has been the National’s grist: not the major devastations but the strange little ache that feels like a precondition to being human. No amount of Transcendental Meditation, Pilates, turmeric, rose quartz, direct sunlight, jogging, oat milk, sleep hygiene, or psychoanalysis can fully alleviate that ambient sadness. Part of it is surely existential—our lives are temporary and inscrutable; death is compulsory and forever—but another part feels more quotidian and incremental, the slow accumulation of ordinary losses. Maybe there’s a person you once loved but lost touch with. A friend who moved to a new town. An apple tree that stood outside your bedroom window, levelled to make way for broadband cable. An old dog. A former colleague. We are always losing, or leaving, or being left, in ways both minor and vast. “The grief it gets me, the weird goodbyes,” Matt Berninger, the band’s vocalist, sings on “Weird Goodbyes,” a recent song featuring Justin Vernon, of Bon Iver. Berninger steels himself to confront the next loss: “Memorize the bathwater, memorize the air / There’ll come a time I’ll wanna know I was here.”
This month, the National will release its ninth album, “First Two Pages of Frankenstein.” Like each of the band’s previous records, it contains pathos and beauty. The National is made up of two sets of brothers—the multi-instrumentalists Aaron and Bryce Dessner, who are twins, and Scott and Bryan Devendorf, on bass and drums, respectively—along with Berninger, whose own brother, the filmmaker Tom Berninger, has become the group’s default documentarian. (In 2013, Tom released a poignant feature, “Mistaken for Strangers,” about his time on tour with the band; it opened the Tribeca Film Festival that year, with an introduction by Robert De Niro.) The group coalesced in a large, unheated industrial space on the oily banks of Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, but its members were brought up around Cincinnati, and have known one another since they were young. Aaron, Bryce, and Bryan began making music together as teen-agers. “We’d set up and basically play instrumental versions of the Grateful Dead,” Bryan told me. “It was, like, ‘Eyes of the World’ for half an hour.” Berninger and Scott, who are a few years older, met in the University of Cincinnati’s graphic-design program. Eventually, Scott, Bryan, Aaron, and Berninger moved to New York City and found desk jobs in design and publishing, while Bryce enrolled in the graduate program at the Yale School of Music. They began playing together at Berninger’s loft, on Third and Bond Streets, then a dicey, barren corner of Brooklyn. “There was a pack of dogs that was always around,” Bryan said. “People would abandon cars and burn them on the street.” Scott and Berninger chose the band’s name mostly for its meaninglessness. “We were trying to name it nothing,” Scott said, laughing. A thread of Midwestern humility—a kind of gentle self-abnegation—still runs through the National’s work.
In post-9/11 New York, bands with an assured sense of style (the Strokes, Interpol, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) were being heralded as the second coming of downtown rock and roll. The National’s presence was more studious. The band members dressed as though they were fluent in Adobe Illustrator. In “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” Lizzy Goodman’s chronicle of the era, Berninger tells a story about how Julian Casablancas, the Strokes’ seductively disaffected singer, nearly stole his date with a single glance. “We were watching these cool bands that were way better than us at the Mercury Lounge, and, literally, people were throwing undergarments,” Bryan recalled. “We were so awkward.” For a long time, the National felt like a secret shared among friends. But gradually Berninger—tall, slender, bearded—developed into a magnetic front man. Onstage, his vibe was gloomy, but also vaguely debauched. He told me, “We were already in love with the songs that we were writing. We just wanted to have other people hear them.” By 2007, when the band released “Boxer,” its fourth LP, it was selling out multi-night stints at the Bowery Ballroom. The following August, Barack Obama put out a campaign video featuring an instrumental version of “Fake Empire,” the album’s dynamic, urging opening track.
The band members are now all in their late forties to early fifties. Their songwriting process starts with melodic sketches by the Dessners; Berninger writes the lyrics, with critical input from his wife, Carin Besser, who edited fiction at The New Yorker from 1999 to 2009. In the past decade and a half, the band has found unexpected purchase on the Billboard charts, with its last four records débuting in the top five. More recently, Aaron has become a sought-after pop producer, collaborating with Taylor Swift on her blockbuster albums “folklore,” “evermore,” and a deluxe version of “Midnights,” and writing with Gracie Abrams, Girl in Red, and Ed Sheeran. Yet it’s Berninger’s voice, a lonesome baritone, that defines the band’s sound. His lyrics often involve water (swimming pools, the sea, a forty-five-minute shower) and tend to express a sense of fitful alienation. On “Mistaken for Strangers,” from 2007, Berninger sings of feeling unknowable and estranged, disillusioned by what he calls the “unmagnificent lives of adults”:
The feeling Berninger is describing here—the feeling that, to some extent, he is always describing—is a soft, amorphous grief. He recognizes it everywhere. “I live in a city sorrow built / It’s in my honey, it’s in my milk,” he sings on “Sorrow,” a track from “High Violet” (2010). Much like his songwriting heroes Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, and Tom Waits, Berninger understands that true misery can also be kind of funny. In collaboration with the artist Ragnar Kjartansson, the National once performed “Sorrow” for six consecutive hours, or approximately a hundred and eight times, at MoMA PS1, in Queens; the band later released the performance on nine clear vinyl records, titling the set “A Lot of Sorrow.” Berninger also knows how to write a sly, lusty quatrain—on “Karen,” from 2005, he sings, “It’s a common fetish / For a doting man / To ballerina on the coffee table / Cock in hand”—though the National lyric that makes me laugh the most is hardly a joke at all. “It’s a Hollywood summer,” Berninger sings on “Conversation 16,” a sombre, whirling track from “High Violet.” “You’d never believe the shitty thoughts I think.”
“Matt is very childlike in a way that I love, and yet so mature and transcendent,” the singer Phoebe Bridgers told me recently. Bridgers sings on two tracks on the band’s new album. In early 2020, she and Berninger performed a duet called “Walking on a String” at Carnegie Hall. Before the show, Bridgers was talking with the musician Conor Oberst, who fronts Bright Eyes. “Conor asked me, ‘Do you think I’m a stunted youth?’ And I was, like, ‘Well, absolutely, but I don’t think that’s necessarily bad,’ ” Bridgers said. Then she walked backstage, and found that Berninger had taken a friend’s beard and draped it over his own lip, so that it looked like he had a mustache. “At Carnegie Hall,” she added. “In a suit.”
In 2014, Berninger and Besser moved to Los Angeles with their four-year-old daughter, Isla, and bought a bungalow in Venice, not far from the ocean. Tom came along, too, and started working out of a guesthouse in the back yard. The three of them were developing a television series based loosely on Tom’s film about the National, but fictionalized. “The pitch was a show not unlike ‘The Monkees,’ but more modern,” Berninger said. “A real, honest look at the music industry.” Berninger put together a band and called it Das Apes. He wrote new songs, some of which ended up on his first solo record, “Serpentine Prison” (2020). They filmed a pilot, scouted locations, took meetings with HBO. In the end, they spent nearly a decade working on the show. “It was this endless circle of excitement and failure, excitement and failure,” Tom told me. Berninger said, “We were sober about the chances of actually getting a TV show. But it felt like we got pretty close.”
Finally, in the spring of 2021, they gave up. “There was real, genuine heartbreak,” Berninger said. “A lot of it was connected to my brother. I felt responsible for pulling him along on a long climb toward something that wasn’t going to work out.” Berninger also felt relief. “I went through a phase where I hibernated,” he said. “I was working on a lot of National songs. But then I slowed down. Then I froze.” The pandemic had halted the live-music industry (in the spring and summer of 2020, the National cancelled an entire thirty-nine-date tour), and it seemed like a good time for the band to start working on a new record. Bryce and Aaron were sending ideas. Berninger was stalling. “For six months or so, I was, like, ‘Yeah, it’s going great! Slow cookin’, everything’s awesome, going great,’ ” Berninger said. “But, in reality, nothing. Nothing at all. I couldn’t do it at all. I went into a kind of panic.” At first, he thought it was a run-of-the-mill writer’s block. “Then I thought, O.K., this is a depression,” he said. “You’ll just deal with it like a flu. I tried a lot of things. Therapy, some antidepressants, exercise. I got totally sober. But that didn’t help, either.” For close to a year, Berninger couldn’t write or sing. “My voice didn’t work,” he said. “I’ve never been a trained singer, but this was like I had no air.”
In some ways, Berninger’s paralysis felt inevitable. “He was never a natural performer,” Aaron said. “None of us were—none of us are, really. But he had to bear the brunt of that. He’s not hiding behind an instrument. I think sometimes we underestimated what that must have felt like, or what it did to him.” When I asked Besser if she felt that the depression was causing the block, or that the block was causing the depression, she thought about it for a moment. “The body got taken down,” she said. “It very much looked like something physical came and was hovering for a while. It was such a physical illness. But he had already been dealing with anxiety, with panic, so it did feel . . . not inevitable, maybe, but it was part of a longer process.” Berninger is hesitant to gripe about the psychic perils of his work, which, from afar, can sound like perks—the adulation of a heaving crowd, travel, celebrity fans, cool suits—but, after two decades, he was spent. “I’d been in a manic phase for a long time,” he said. “I could never totally wind down.”
In April, 2022, the National gathered at Long Pond, Aaron’s studio outside Hudson, New York, with the hope of finally recording new songs. The band’s songwriting process has always been marked by brotherly tension and perfectionism. “People throw punches that usually don’t hurt, but you occasionally catch one that’s not so nice,” Bryce told me. But this time it felt like more was at stake. Berninger wasn’t doing well. “He hit a really real, very dark, very bleak spot,” Tom said. Berninger said that he was “close to nonverbal” during this phase: “The guys were watching the World Cup—I was watching a ball bounce around. I couldn’t be interested in anything.” Performing was excruciating. He recalled, “I was able to sort of mumble and free-associate some things, and Aaron would try to encourage me—‘That’s great! Let’s make a song out of it!’ And I would say, ‘There’s no song there.’ ” At one point, Tom urged his brother to think of his pain as creative fodder. “I said, ‘Matt, use this feeling and write about it,’ ” Tom told me. “He just looks at me with, like, anger in his eyes. ‘What do you think I’ve been fucking doing for the past twenty years? All I’ve been writing about is depression.’ ”
For a moment, it seemed as though the National might break up. Eight albums, world tours, twenty-odd years together—it had been a good run. “It’s never lost on me that I get to be a wizard of the black magic that’s music,” Berninger told me. “I get to make these spells that make people cry, that make me cry. But to suddenly feel like that weird gift you had that enabled you to put little bits of words together and put them to a melody, or whatever songwriting is, this thing that you’ve built a whole life out of . . .” He paused. “The sparkles weren’t coming from my fingertips.” The focus of the Long Pond sessions shifted. Bryce told me, “I definitely thought it was ending. It wasn’t about pushing Matt to finish this record so we could get back on tour and earn some money. I was actually surprised to find out how much I love him. I always have.”