The eleven tracks on The National’s new studio album ‘High Violet’ were recorded at the band’s own studio in Brooklyn, with further recording and mixing at Tarquin Studios in Bridgeport, Connecticut with Peter Katis. On the live front, The National will be making a one-off UK appearance at London’s Royal Albert Hall in May, and tickets for this date sold out immediately. Further shows and festival appearances will be announced soon. The music on ‘High Violet’ is wide-ranging in its moods, by turns intimate and rough, expansive and spare, full of stark angles and atmosphere.•Matt Berninger’s singing - wild, half-broken, sly - evokes a feeling of being haunted, by love, by paranoia, by something just out of reach. ‘High Violet’ may be The National’s most thematically twisted record to date but it somehow also manages to be their most infectious and immediate.
