I haven’t been able to step away from the new record for more than a couple days at a time. I think it’s great, albeit a different kind of album. I think they have changed up their sound. You can hear it on SWB and IAETF. The new one is more dialing back down to older core sounds, but matured? Or something like that. I think it’s way better than people are giving it credit for, but I think some of the reasons it doesn’t hit hard at first is the production.
A lot of these songs have incredible details, but they feel muted a little bit. It works when you’re listening closely, like all the pretty sounds on New Order T-Shirt. But other times it should be hitting you in the face but it doesn’t. Like the climax of This Isn’t Helping should be much more cathartic sounding than it is. Or even the drums that come in at the end of Alien. Why aren’t they even more pronounced? Yet in spite of those little issues I have with the album, I think it delivers on being a nice breath of air away from the larger, more moody and lightly experimental past two albums. It feels at ease, yet it turns up the tempo enough throughout the keep it engaging. The sequence at the end is a bit too down tempo to close it all out, but other than that I think it works really well.
And considering the difficulty it took to make this music, especially for Matt’s writing and even singing, I think they found themselves on a nice roll once they started recording. Like this is an album as a process, if that makes sense. It’s them piercing themselves back together as a band in real time almost. If a second album is coming sooner than they’ve ever done before, I think it’ll be even better than this one. They’ll have been recording it feeling more together as The National than when they started recorded FTPOF.