Photo: Chris MacDonald
The National have shared a mysterious video that hints that new music is on the way.
The clip, which is only a few seconds long, sounds like an outtake from the studio and features a dissonant overdriven guitar and haunting synth tones that evoke the chaos and paranoia that manifests in the modern world.
The clip seems to parody 24 hour news channels and may be a comment on the troubling affect of the information age. The words "Sleep well beast" and "The system only sleeps in darkness" roll across the screen implying some important sociological messages may be coming on the new album. In the background flickering projections beam out onto a sleepless household.
Previously, singer Matt Berninger told Rolling Stone that "the album is about marriage, and it's about marriages falling apart. I'm happily married, and but it's hard, marriage is hard and my wife and I are writing the lyrics together about our own struggles and it's difficult to write, but it's saving my marriage."
The follow up to 2013's critically-acclaimed National album Trouble Will Find Me has been a long time in the making with the band hard at work on it since 2014.
Back that year frontman Matt Berninger told Gigwise that they were trying to "get together to try and write together in a room - which we've never done. We always work on little things and email back and forth. We have no idea whether it's going to work or not, but that's as far as we've got with the new record: trying to work out a plan and a different approach."
He continued: "That might fail miserably, but then we'll try it a different way."
However it seems to have worked and we're looking forward to hearing the results, or some of the results, hopefully, ahead of their forthcoming appearance at Glastonbury Festival.
