THE NATIONAL
For LP seven, indie arena-kings get loose and strained in New York and East Berlin. “WE’VE PUSHED INTO ANOTHER DIMENSION.”
Long based in Brooklyn, The National’s members are now scattered in locations across America and Europe. Forced to rethink their approach ahead of their seventh album, the solution was to build a new studio-cum-club house, Long Pond, in the grounds of guitarist/chief producer Aaron Dessner’s rural Hudson Valley home in upstate New York. The barn-like structure that serves as their new HQ also features on the cover of Sleep Well Beast. “I think of it as like a combination of a church and a garage,” says Dessner. “It’s looking out at this very tranquil scene where there’s a long, thin spring-fed pond, and just beautiful nature. Mountains and forest and lots of wildlife. I think we all relaxed and allowed ourselves a lot of latitude. It wasn’t a very formal process.” This rustic environment’s influence can be heard on Sleep Well Beast, an overall more meditative and atmospherically experimental record than the band’s previous offerings, with layers of treated sounds and electronics. “Genuinely it’s quite different in some critical ways,” says Dessner. “We didn’t clean anything up. There are rough edges and accidents.” Away from Long Pond, Dessner and his twin brother, bandmate Bryce, took song files with them to Berlin’s Funkhaus Studios, where they invited contributions from random collaborators as part of their week-long September 2016 Michelberger Music festival residency, staged in cahoots with Bon Iver. “We just had these pieces of music playing with no vocals,” Dessner says. “Musicians from many different backgrounds would wander through the room and improvise and try things. I think you can hear that in the fabric of the record.” Guests on Sleep Well Beast include Justin Vernon, Lisa Hannigan, Mouse On Mars and New York’s So Percussion quartet. Two contributors whose names Dessner chooses not to reveal, however, are the female and male voices heard in Walk It Back quoting an interview rant by hard-line US political strategist Karl Rove (“We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do”). But Dessner insists this isn’t a Political Record – singer Matt Berninger sounds more lyrically preoccupied with the strains of long-term marriage, not least in Guilty Party (“We got nothing left to say/Another year gets away”). “A lot of the songs are about relationships,” Dessner admits. “Specifically between a man and wife.” That’s not to say recording the album was all heavy emotional weather. Downtime pursuits at Long Pond involved “alcohol and other things”, such as fishing, boating and building swings. The air of relaxed creativity has led to perhaps The National’s most alluring and adventurous record to date. “There’s a certain confidence and it’s not so introverted sonically,” Dessner states. “I feel like we’ve pushed into another dimension.”