The National already have “another record worth of album-quality songs”
The National’s Aaron Dessner has claimed the band already have “another record worth of album-quality songs” after releasing their latest album The First Two Pages Of Frankenstein on April 28th.
Speaking to Vulture, Dessner revealed: “There’s at least another record’s worth of album-quality songs. Most of them are as good as anything on this record. We will do something with the other material. You can hear bits of it, like ‘Eucalyptus’ or ‘Grease in Your Hair.’ You think it’s going to be rock, or somebody will say something, but in reality it’ll be quite different. It’ll go to a different emotional place. We sound like ourselves, you know what I mean?”
The band’s latest LP is their first since 2019’s I Am Easy To Find. It features collaborations with Sufjan Stevens, Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridgers. In the period between records, frontman Matt Berninger suffered severely with depression and writer’s block. “Usually when I’m in a troubled place, I can make something out of it, and write a song about it, and that does a lot to solve it,” he recently told Uncut. “This time, I didn’t want to. I was uninterested in my own grief. I was uninterested in my own problems. I was maybe even a little embarrassed by it.”
Berninger continued: “Then the longer I went without really exercising that [writing] part of myself the harder it got to connect to it. The untangling, or whatever the thrill is about making something out of nothing.”
In a three-and-a-half star review of The First Two Pages Of Frankenstein, Far Out‘s Tom Taylor wrote: “It might not zip with the pizzazz of raw vigour or invention and there’s the occasional slightly cliched bit of clumsiness or tad of cheese, but when you nestle into the mood, all of these points are somewhat moot because their compositional orchestration remains honed to a humbling wallop.”
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