Track Review: Alphabet City and Space Invader // The National

Just four months after their latest full-length LP, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, The National have returned with two new singles, released with no promotion at all.

It’s fair to say that The National have significantly mellowed over the last decade, with lead singer and songwriter Matt Berninger settling into middle-age suburban ennui, long before their collaborations with Taylor Swift catapulted them into the ‘sad-girl’ territory that guitarist Aaron Dessner now dominates.

How the band got here is unsurprising. They’ve always embraced the white-collar American ideal; if you go back as far as Alligator you can find gems such as, “All night I lay on my pillow and pray / For my boss to stop me in the hallway / Lay my head on his shoulder and say ‘Son, I’ve been hearing good things’”, and Trouble Will Find Me highlight ‘Humiliation’ (which has been revived in recent live shows) is about being blown up by a drone missile by a pool at a dinner party.

Yet none of this sounds absurd when you listen to the music. Instead, Berninger’s lyrics come off as evocative, wistful, and candidly twisted, qualities that have also been ever-present in Swift’s music – something that makes their songs so relatable and evergreen for many.

First Two Pages of Frankenstein has received criticism for its ‘Swift-ification’ of The National (though one could argue it is in fact the National-ification of Taylor Swift that has gotten us here), but it was an excellent display of ‘less is more’. The sparse instrumentation of ‘Once Upon a Poolside’ and the disjointed, mechanical lyricism of ‘Grease in Your Hair’ made them two of the band’s strongest songs in a long time.

The new songs, however, are markedly different; more experimental (like Sleep Well Beast); more anxious (like High Violet); more palatable for fans of the band’s earlier works, abandoning the piano-driven ballads and drum machines that have dominated the last three albums.

The delayed guitar riff of ‘Alphabet City’ gives it a stuttering tension that never quite resolves, while Berninger ruminates on his inability to move on from someone. Berninger’s uncomfortable honesty, one of the band’s most alluring qualities, shines through in the song: “Sometimes I want to drive around and find you / And act like it’s a random thing”. ‘Alphabet City’ alone is far more unsettled than anything on First Two Pages of Frankenstein, intriguing, alienating, and unlike anything the band has done before.

The idea of space on the song (“I’ll still be here when you come back from space”) continues on ‘Space Invader’, a behemoth of a song and the band’s longest yet at seven minutes. Debuted as a folk song with Bryce Dessner on the banjo last year, it has since evolved into a thrilling rock ballad written to fill arenas. Lyrically it draws from the same theme as Swift’s ‘Invisible String’, with Berninger asking, “What if I stayed on the C train until Lafayette? / What if we never met?”; the song’s work in progress title, ‘Threaded Gold’, calls back to the notion of “one single thread of gold [that] tied me to you”. In a moment of catharsis, the second half of the song builds up to an explosive ending, something The National have attempted before (‘I’ll Still Destroy You’, ‘So Far So Fast’, ‘Alien’) but ‘Space Invader’ is their best try yet.

So what’s next? The sudden release of these singles open up the possibility of a new record being imminent. The band has debuted an album’s worth of songs live on their current tour, and have promised to find a home for last summer’s standalone single ‘Weird Goodbyes’. But for now, the band’s Homecoming Festival, where they will play High Violet and Trouble Will Find Me in full, is the next stop on their list before they come to the UK.

Words by Stephen Ong

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