High Violet
A dense, murky masterpiece of orchestral indie rock. Matt Berninger's anxious baritone floats over driving, syncopated drums and swelling brass arrangements.
A dense, murky masterpiece of orchestral indie rock. Matt Berninger's anxious baritone floats over driving, syncopated drums and swelling brass arrangements.
Anthemic consolidation
A heavy, soot-colored fog settles over the band's signature nervous energy here, transforming their jittery Brooklyn indie rock into something grand and architectural. By anchoring the anxious baritone vocals within dense walls of brass and double-drum patterns, this record perfected the dark, orchestral grandeur they had spent a decade chasing. You are no longer listening to a band in a cramped room, but rather navigating a vast, dimly lit cavern where every shadow has been meticulously arranged. It is the precise moment their insomniac worries grew large enough to fill festival stages without losing their bruising intimacy.
The band trades their usual spacious arrangements for a layered dense production style, building a suffocatingly beautiful wall of sound where guitars and brass merge into a singular, heavy wool blanket.
Critics warmly embraced the album, praising its finely detailed production for beautifully balancing dense and atmospheric textures without ever feeling over-refined. The songwriting was widely admired for evolving the band's signature sound, standing confidently alongside their previous acclaimed work while establishing its own distinct emotional depth.
“Bleak as you like, but strangely cathartic in many places”Read review
“Singer Matt Berninger’s gorgeous baritone is still the band’s main selling point”Read review
“A fine album, a very, very solid effort that contains some marvelous storytelling and near perfect execution. There are no faults to speak of. But that electricity, that fly by the seat of your pants thrill is something that eludes The National”Read review
“It is a leap forward for the Brooklyn five-piece and Matt Berninger’s baritone has never packed more heft”
“Muscular, miserable, mighty, and meandering”Read review
“Anyone who loves this record probably has a very exact idea of how it touches on their own life, but most of us probably aren’t going to want to share”
“At the peak moments of High Velvet, The National are magnificent”Read review
“High Violet is carefully considered without being labored, richly detailed without being fussy”Read review
“On The National’s fifth album the band’s aim is true; its vision unflinching yet more inclusive, more alive to the possibility of meaningful escape”Read review
“It is a wild, vivid romance that The National make their own, and on High Violet it sounds just as striking, just as wild, just as vivid as ever”Read review
“No other band makes dark and stormy seem like ideal weather”Read review
“The National have pulled off a neat trick here - an immediate, commercial album that grows with each listen. While High Violet is patently as good as its antecedents, it is also very much its own beast”
Cassette uses generative AI to enrich its catalog. How we use AI →
