Matt Berninger says solo career seeks to “undo” his work in The National
Matt Berninger has opened up about his solo career, discussing the creative direction of his work in relation to his current band, The National.
Berninger released his second solo album, Get Sunk, in May 2025. Since then, Berninger has been touring the new work, first across North America, and now across the UK and Europe. Speaking at End of the Road festival in Salisbury, Berninger ruminated on how he has felt about the last hectic few months in his calendar.
The singer opened up to Uncut about touring first. “The best thing about going solo is you get a nice bedroom on a bus. The rest of it is hell,” he laughed.
Though he seems comfortable in his solo career now, on his first solo album, 2020’s Serpentine Prison, that wasn’t the case. “I was reluctant to do a solo album, that stinks of betrayal,” he shared. At first, he wanted to only put out covers of songs.
Covers are still included in his work. He will send his band difficult songs he’d love to expand upon, such as Radiohead’s ‘Kid A’, and by “soundcheck, they’ve figured them out.”
He added, “Part of going solo is a way to undo the package of what Matt Berninger, the lead singer of The National, is. Complicate that.”
Ever the poetic, Berninger, who founded The National in 1999, left the audience dumbfounded with an eloquent discussion on how he feels religion and music marry. “In many ways,” he declared, “music, rock festivals, rock clubs, Royal Albert Hall, Mercury Lounge, the Buffalo Bar, those are sanctuaries of spirituality and vision. Artists are trying to figure out God. In songs, everybody’s just trying to figure out the meaning of their own life and their own heart and their own existence, the good artists, that’s what they’re all doing.”
Far Out gave Berninger’s Get Sunk a glowing four-star review, writing, “Everything is patiently executed. Berninger teases you with flourishes of break-out instrumentation be it in a subtle guitar solo, female harmony or on the last track, an organ. Opening doors of sonic expansion before soon closing them, to keep you immersed in this one coherent and conceptual soundscape, it’s a refined and accurate take of his own artistic voice.”
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