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t may have taken them longer than some to get here, but The National have finally achieved the acclaim they deserve. On 2005’s breakthrough album ‘Alligator’, Matt sung sardonically about music ‘that only lasts the season / And only heard by bedroom kids who buy for that reason,’ but 2010’s ‘High Violet’ saw the band establish themselves as truly important. With ‘Trouble Will Find Me’ they are set to raise the bar even higher. It’s an album that ebbs and flows beautifully. Different from ‘High Violet’, richer and more intricate, it reveals a band comfortable in the knowledge they have earned their right to sit at music’s top table. “I think there was a self-confidence that dawned on us after ‘High Violet’. We started to trust the chemistry in the band,” Aaron, who with his twin brother Bryce writes the band’s music, explains.
time we knew they were coming and we weathered them.” ‘Insecurities’ and ‘neuroses’ are words which keep cropping up, but Aaron says for this album that changed. “I can honestly say this is the first record where we had no rules, no insecurities or anxieties driving it.” It was the birth of Aaron’s daughter which ignited the spate of songwriting that would form this album, and it was something which forced Bryce to raise his game, too. “Aaron had a child and was spending sleepless nights awake so he generated tons of material and I thought I better write some of mine. I think a year and a half ago there were thirty or forty sketches. Then we sent them to Matt and he started to generate all these melodies.” These ‘sketches’ were eventually whittled down to thirteen tracks, and all the band were unanimous in their agreement that these were the strongest songs for the album.
Not that they intended to create a new album after touring ‘High Lyrically this record seemed to Violet’. It seems it’s precisely this come together a lot more easily “This is the lack of a plan that has given them than on previous occasions, too. the freedom to make a record that “From ‘High Violet’ all I cared f i rst r e c o r d is liberated from the shackles of about was melody,” Matt explains, expectation and over-thinking “I would just sing along for the where we that has weighed down on them whole track and then I’d mute it on previously. “We decided to and do another one completely had no not make a record for possibly different, and there’d be twenty four years. Aaron and Bryan had of these. Me just free-associating. babies and I had a two-year-old. Then later I would piece the rules.” We had some perspective which melodies I liked together and made it feel like the band wasn’t words would fall into them. I was the most important thing in our listening to a ton of Roy Orbison lives,” Matt says. “Somehow the pressure of being in stuff and I got really excited about how he would go the band and what sort of album we should follow from one octave and then go up four octaves and the up ‘High Violet’ with; none of those thoughts were song would change completely. Working this way led in the process at all. Songs just started to bloom in me to write better lyrics because they were following their own organic way.” melody and they loosened up some of the neuroses.” For Bryce this meant the band could push their ideas as far as they liked. “In the past we’ve had to make compromises by being late or stressed but in this case we went as far as we could with everything so there are no feelings of regret.” It also meant they were able to deal with the actual process of making an album more easily. “There’s a certain neuroses in our process. It’s always intense, it’s always manic,” he explains. “There’s always certain arguments but this
Yet the lyrical themes remain similar. Matt’s preoccupation with re-imagining romance and existential insecurity in vivid ways are just as resonant as always. “Romance and insecurity and social anxiety are in all of our records. This one has plenty of those, and a new thing is a recognition of mortality - but it’s either funny stories about dying or questions of what it means to exist.”
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