Analysis: The Soothing Melancholy of Matt Berninger

“Perhaps after once in a lifetime, we’ll understand what we’ve lost,” Matt Berninger croons on “No Love,” a poignant, tearful standout from his sophomore solo effort. The National leader appears to contemplate that question for several lifetimes. On Get Sunk, he continues to explore the same exquisitely pained alt-rock that his band is known for, translating his most intimately observed thoughts, struggles, aspirations, and anxieties into beautiful, solitary tracks like the gentle rock number “Bonnet of Pins,” the orchestral folk piece “Breaking Into Acting,” and the jazz-tinged “Silver Jeep.” The sound is more subdued compared to The National, crafted with the help of collaborators like soul legend Booker T. Jones and Meg Duffy of Hand Habits, who provide the perfect backdrop for Berninger to extract every fragment of nuanced malaise from lines like “God loves the inland ocean/Lost cause, I have no emotion.”

Delivered in his signature melancholic baritone, these detailed emotional explorations might come off as overly somber or dull, but he presents them with a conversational honesty that infuses them with a sense of welcome openness rather than grim heaviness. Having recently moved from Los Angeles to Connecticut with his family, you can often sense a blend of comfort and displacement in the music. In “Silver Jeep,” he juxtaposes existential dread (“All I want is my soul to keep working/I see the sunlight creep around the curtain”) with mundane domestic matters (“If the guy comes to do the garden/I’ll leave an envelope by the faucet”), suggesting that both aspects can either overwhelm you or, strangely enough, sustain you.

The elongated, languid quality of the music, along with its polished texture and intricate details, enhances the feeling of midlife drifting by, reminiscent of a Midwest indie-rock dad navigating through the refined leisure that his successful career and wise choices have afforded him. Instead of feeling pity for him, you find yourself envious. In an ideal world, everyone would have the opportunity and leisure to be this respectfully self-indulgent. The album-closing track “Times of Difficulty” transforms the emo mantra “Get drunk/Get sunk” into an introspective cry for depth, yet the overall impression is both generous and filled with angst—a Nabokov-inspired cocktail for literate Gen X individuals meandering through suburban blues, one slow revelation at a time.