Artist

The National

Cincinnati, United States · Formed 1999

The National is a music group from Cincinnati, United States, active since 1999. Their discography on Gatefold includes 21 records.

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Albums tracked

501

In collections

1999

Since

Biography

Peter Katis didn't let them hide behind their day jobs anymore on Alligator. He dragged them out of their Brooklyn basement apartments and forced Matt Berninger's baritone right to the front of the mix. Before Katis got his hands on them at Tarquin Studios, they were just another bunch of Ohio transplants playing alt-country-adjacent college rock. Katis made them sound like a band that actually wanted to be heard. They built their reputation on being the ultimate band of anxious, over-educated cubicle dwellers. Bryan Devendorf's drumming is the secret weapon. He does not play standard indie-rock backbeats. He loops these nervous, syncopated polyrhythms that give Berninger's bourbon-soaked mumbles some real structural muscle. By the time they hit Boxer, they had the formula down cold. Then the mid-career bloat hit. They started inviting half of indie rock to guest on their records. They got too comfortable in their own luxury-sadness brand. But even when the records sound like they were mixed inside a high-end Scandinavian furniture store, they can still write a song that feels like a brick through a window.

Bio from The Clerk

The Arc of The National

The pivots — what forced The National to reinvent.

The Brooklyn Indie-Rock Blueprint
They spent their first two records trying to find a lane before signing to Beggars Banquet and letting Peter Katis steer the ship. Alligator and Boxer defined this era of dark, ornate post-punk revivalism. They stopped pretending to be a country band and embraced Bryan Devendorf's intricate, martial drumming as their core engine. This is where Berninger figured out how to balance his deadpan humor with genuine desperation.
The Mid-Tempo Arena Phase
High Violet and Trouble Will Find Me saw them trading the scrappy, basement-built tension for massive, reverby room sounds. They started writing for outdoor festivals, which meant Aaron and Bryce Dessner began layering horns, strings, and massive piano chords. The brass arrangements on Terrible Love and Fake Empire became their new signature. They became the definitive soundtrack for aging millennials who still wanted to feel something in a crowd of thirty thousand people.
The Electronic Detour
For Sleep Well Beast, they built Long Pond Studio in upstate New York and bought a bunch of modular synthesizers. They started chopping up Bryan's drums into digital glitches and letting Bryce play actual guitar solos again. It was a conscious effort to break their own songwriting templates. You can hear the drum machines clashing with real percussion, giving the tracks a cold, fractured edge that matched the themes of marital collapse.

Influences

The Silver Jews — Matt Berninger has repeatedly cited David Berman's surrealist, dry-witted lyricism as his primary blueprint for songwriting. You can hear Berman's influence in how Berninger drops hyper-specific, mundane details into grand, tragic statements. It is the art of the funny-sad lyric.
Leonard Cohen — They covered Memories for a tribute record, and Berninger's entire vocal delivery is a direct descendant of Cohen's late-career register. The low, rumbling baritone that stays in a narrow, conversational range is straight out of the Cohen playbook. He learned how to make a whisper sound louder than a scream from those classic records.
Guided by Voices — As Ohio natives, they grew up on Robert Pollard's beer-soaked indie-rock masterclasses and actually opened for them in their early days. The National's penchant for anthemic, fist-pumping choruses buried inside otherwise quiet songs comes directly from the lo-fi basement rock of their home state. It is the midwestern basement energy they never quite lost.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds — The band has cited Cave's ability to blend theatrical menace with beautiful balladry as a massive influence on their dynamics. The Dessner brothers' dense, layered arrangements on Boxer mirror the elegant, dread-filled instrumentation of the Bad Seeds' mid-90s work. It is the sound of elegant men playing very dark music.
Pavement — They covered Here on the Cherry Tree EP, showing their reverence for Stephen Malkmus's slack-rock legacy. Bryan Devendorf's drumming patterns often mirror the loose-but-steady drive of Steve West's work on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. It kept them from getting too precious or polite in the studio.