NATIONAL TREASURES

IN 2019, The National curated a “friends and family” covermount CD for Uncut, drawing together tracks that highlighted their healthy and productive relationships with other artists – including Bon Iver, Sharon Van Etten and This Is The Kit. To accompany this month’s Uncut cover story, The National have compiled a covermount CD that has their own music at its core. “It’s a mix of new, off-the-beaten-path and live versions, alongside some of our favourite tracks of the past few years made together and collaboratively with others,” they tell us.

To open the CD, the band selected a track from their new studio album, First Two Pages Of Frankenstein. Accordingly, the 14 tracks that follow it feel very much like a summary of where The National are in 2023: apart from three songs, everything here dates from the past two or three years. The CD covers a lot of ground – from hook-ups with Michael Stipe and Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold, to immersive film scores, ruminative chamber folk and even a Grateful Dead cover. But with so many potential tracks to choose from, and five band members with very strong opinions, were there lengthy conversations spent haggling over the final tracklisting? “Not so much horse trading,” the band reveal. “We wanted to find a group of tracks that mixed well together, given the variety. There are some throughlines to it all.”

Welcome, then, to a very special Uncut covermount CD. We hope you enjoy it. We’ll leave the final word to The National themselves: “Thanks to Uncut

for the chance to make this compilation, and to you for listening.”

MICHAEL BONNER