The National have built a career on making sadness sound romantic, anxiety sound anthemic, and regret sound like a slow-burning barstool confession. But with Sleep Well Beast, Matt Berninger sounds angry.
Sure, The National have always trafficked in melancholy, but this album takes that brooding, intellectual despair and injects it with something sharper, something more guttural. Maybe it’s politics. Maybe it’s personal. Maybe it’s just the slow-burning existential crisis that comes from fronting a band for over two decades while still trying to figure out what it all means. Either way, Berninger knows the difference between a love song and a protest song is mostly just a matter of perspective.
“You don’t know when you’re gonna run out of ideas, or run out of hunger for it, or run out of the thrill of it,” he tells me, acknowledging that, yes, the fear of making an ass out of himself is still present but maybe a little more manageable now.
Politics, Relationships, and the Overlapping Venn Diagram of Despair
The album blurs the lines between political rage and personal turmoil, which, to be fair, is kind of The National’s whole thing. “It’s always been blurry for me,” Berninger admits. “What’s the difference between a love song and a protest?” A solid point—both involve disappointment, simmering resentment, and an unhealthy attachment to something that doesn’t love you back.
A good chunk of Sleep Well Beast was already in motion before 2016 happened, but once Trump won, everything got a little darker, a little more uncertain. “Everything kind of shut down for a while,” Berninger says. “I didn’t want to write about politics. I didn’t want to write about what I was writing about anymore.” Instead, he did what most of us did: avoided the news, stared into the void, and reassessed everything.
“From there, I slowly started putting it all back together,” he says. The result? An album that feels like waking up from a nightmare and realizing you’re still in it—but at least now you’ve had some coffee.
The Anger Phase: Enter ‘Turtleneck’
If The National’s usual brand of ennui is a slow smolder, Turtleneck is a goddamn explosion. It’s a song that sounds like Berninger woke up one morning and decided to fight someone, or at least yell about sweaters until his throat gave out.
“That one came really late,” he says, like a guy who wasn’t expecting to lose his voice mid-tour. “I didn’t have that kind of anger anymore… until recently.” Turns out, after sadness, anger is the next logical step. “It was just one of those things where I finally came out of the fog and had enough energy to be pissed off.”
It’s also, as he freely admits, a song that’s going to feel really weird to perform when he’s 60. “I’m gonna look like an idiot then,” he laughs, fully aware that Turtleneck might be a little less convincing when he’s got reading glasses tucked into one.
The Breakup That Happens Every Month (But Not Really)
Then there’s Guilty Party, which, on the surface, reads like a devastating breakup song. And in a way, it is—except Berninger and his wife (and frequent songwriting collaborator) aren’t actually breaking up.
“We break up every month,” he says matter-of-factly. “Sometimes for 20 minutes, sometimes for a day or two.” It’s not dysfunction; it’s just how they operate. “I think we make a mistake thinking we pick something, settle into it, and it just stays that way. People change. Relationships evolve.”
It also helps when your marriage functions like a high-stakes writing workshop. “She’d never let me write about something that wasn’t real,” he says. “I wrote most of it and let her hear it, and she was like, ‘I think that’s an interesting one, but let’s take that all the way.’” So they did, because apparently, for the Berningers, nothing says romance like a brutally honest lyrical autopsy of your own relationship.
So, Uh… Does She Get a Cut?
Given how integral she is to the process, does Berninger’s wife, Carin Besser, ever get an official songwriter’s cut? “She’s always been credited,” he says, carefully sidestepping whether there’s an extra slice of The National’s revenue pie with her name on it. “She’s never asked her lawyer, and I’ve never asked her to ask her lawyer. Which is good, because we have the same lawyer.”
That’s love, folks.
Destroying and Being Destroyed
Some of Sleep Well Beast’s most evocative lyrics lean into both devotion and destruction, like I’ll Still Destroy You, which appears multiple times throughout the album. In a band that thrives on the fine line between adoration and obliteration, it’s both a threat and a promise—perfect for band members trapped on a bus together for months on end.
“It started as an innocent little saying,” Berninger says. “And then, in the context of the record and the times, it took on a whole bunch of different spins.” Much like Turtleneck, it’s one of those lines that might not age gracefully when he’s well into his AARP years, but hey—what’s rock and roll without a little reckless abandon?
The National, Still Holding It Together (Somehow)
Through all the chaos, The National have done something remarkable: they’ve lasted. While so many of their early 2000s peers have either imploded or coasted into irrelevance, they’ve stayed relevant, ambitious, and genuinely interesting. And yeah, it probably helps that their whole aesthetic is “mid-life crisis, but make it art.”
Berninger knows this band is a marriage in itself. “A lot of this stuff, sometimes I think about Aaron [Dessner] or Bryan [Devendorf] or the band in general,” he says. “It’s not always clear who and what everything is about, but the emotional center of it is always real.”
And that’s why they’re still here—because they keep figuring out ways to make despair feel like catharsis.
Listen to the interview above and then check out "Day I Die" below!
