The National- High Violet

“Sorrow found me when I was young,” the National frontman Matt Berninger sings on “Sorrow,” High Violet’s second track. “Sorrow waited, sorrow won.”

It’s a remarkably apt lyric for Berninger and the National, whose career arc has seen them release increasingly bleak albums to increasingly widespread critical acclaim. It’s also representative of Berninger’s mindset on High Violet, which plumbs previously unforeseen emotional depths and, in doing so, propels the National to new heights.

On previous album Boxer, Berninger grappled with the contrast between insouciant youth and anxious adulthood, and the consequent strain on relationships with lovers and friends. “One time you were a glowing young ruffian,” Berninger sang, “Oh my God, it was a million years ago.” Although High Violet treads some similar territory, it’s also a far more neurotic beast. Gone are the intractable relationship struggles of “Start A War,” instead replaced by the pervasive paranoia of “Conversation 16: “I was afraid I’d eat your brains/Cause I’m evil.”

Because the National are such an unrelenting downer, they’ve drawn comparisons throughout their career to successful acts also consumed by negativity—from Leonard Cohen to Interpol’s Turn on the Bright Lights. But never before has the doom-and-gloom torch been passed to a band endowed with such sublime talents. Dessner brothers Aaron (bass) and Bryce (guitar), who along with producer Peter Katis are the primary composers of most National songs. They have a knack for arrangements and dramatic melodies far more potent than those of their thematic predecessors. Look no further than the cinema-ready “Runaway,” a horns-and-strings bit that soars and dives around Berninger’s refrain of, “We’ve got another thing coming undone/And it’s taking us over.” Bryan Devendorf’s drumming, perhaps the National’s signature sound, is truly a tour de force on High Violet: at times emotive, at others emphatic and always a definitive sonic texture.

The sound throughout High Violet is one of a slow, smoldering burn—the minor key guitars of “Sorrow,” the languid strings of “Afraid of Everyone”—and the album’s penultimate track, “England,” initially appears to follow the same course. “Someone send a runner through the weather that I’m under for the feeling that I lost today,” Berninger requests, with typical brilliance. But then, like the storm clouds that hang invariably over High Violet suddenly parting, the tempo changes: Devendorf’s drums start charging hard, horns exultant atop the mix, the whole thing building with each cymbal splash. It’s a fleeting moment, quickly subsiding into subdued guitars, but nevertheless an undeniably triumphant sequence—the sound of a band, consumed with fear of simply leaving the bedroom, aiming for the rafters and actually hitting them.