Hear Me Out: ‘Trouble Will Find Me’ is still The National’s best album
Slow, depressing, melancholic, beautiful, joyous, angry, sad, anthemic – The National are all of those things and more. And never have they better encapsulated that range of emotions than in their 2013 album Trouble Will Find Me. Recorded at a time when the band felt, in their own words, more “satisfied” than ever before, the free-spirited and confident nature of the record shines through in the final product.
Trouble Will Find Me is The National’s ultimate statement: the time when they landed on the perfect point between happy and sad, accessible and obtuse, hopeful and wistful.
After toiling away for 11 years, 2010’s High Violet was The National’s long-awaited breakthrough into the mainstream. It reached the top three of the charts in America, the UK, Canada and much of Europe, and was supported by a mammoth 18-month world tour. The plan was pretty simple when it finally concluded: rest, rest, and more rest. “We felt satisfied at the end of touring High Violet,” lead singer Matt Berninger told Pitchfork in 2013. “It was the first time ever, or at least in the past ten years, where we felt like we could put the band on the shelf for a little while, put a record out in three, four years. There wasn’t any sense of, what now?”
But they soon found themselves asking the question anyway. By the end of the High Violet tour, they were already playing some new songs live – and suddenly, the band felt inspired to record again. Once the creative ball starts rolling, you might as well try and keep pace with it. And having reached a certain level of creative and financial satisfaction, the band finally felt free to make a record on their own terms. “In the past, it’s been hard to enjoy writing, but I loved the process for this record,” Berninger said at the time. “I think a lot of it was because I wasn’t worried – I didn’t care what the songs were going to be about, or if they were going to seem depressing, or cool, or whatever.”
The songs soon started flowing. First came ‘I Should Live in Salt’. The lilting, acoustic ballad written as a kind of apology to Berninger’s brother. It sounded more hopeful than The National, even if still draped in its customary melancholy. ‘Demons’ demonstrates the kind of defiant attitude that Berninger spoke of at the time, ditching opaque metaphors and carefully-worded couplets in favour of brutal honesty: “I am secretly in love with / Everyone that I grew up with,” “When I walk into a room, I do not light it up / Fuck!”
If it’s easy to imagine the band recording these songs in a dark, candle-lit room, that’s because they did record these songs in a dark, candle-lit room. They had decamped to Clubhouse Recording Studios for the album sessions, a studio modelled on a 19th-century barn in upstate New York. They were interrupted not once but twice by the elements: first by tornado-level winds and then by Hurricane Sandy. The storms left them without power for days on end, meaning they were forced to write and record by candlelight. Suddenly, the late-night whiskey-swilling swing of ‘Pink Rabbits’ and hopeful longing of ‘This is the Last Time’ starts to make perfect sense. Meanwhile, the video for ‘Sea of Love’ visualises that cramped together, us-against-the-world mentality that the band had fostered during the long, dark nights spent recording.
Despite the interruptions, the sessions for Trouble Will Find Me were productive. The album clocks in at almost one hour, yet the band had an excess of material that eventually seeped out into future releases. ‘Learning’ ended up as the B-Side to ‘I Need My Girl,’ ‘Rylan’ made its way on I Am Easy to Find, and the Sharon van Etten-featuring ‘Sunshine On My Back’ was released as a standalone single.
The tour for Trouble Will Find Me turned out to be just as lengthy as the last, yet the band had never been in a better place to deal with it. By the time this one concluded, they finally had their long-awaited rest. Four years passed until their next release (2017’s Sleep Well Beast) – their longest gap between albums to date.
Free of the financial pressures and weight of self-expectation that had dogged previous releases, Trouble Will Find Me found The National at the perfect time in their career. They’re often lazily tagged as a miserable band, and while it’s difficult to say this is a happy record, there are enough green shoots of optimism throughout to reach a new world of fans. Stripped down and simplistic yet intricate and carefully-constructed, Trouble Will Find Me captures everything that’s good about The National in one record. And it’s still their best album.
