Tylenol, Beer & Love Across The Ocean: This The National Record Is The Album Of The Decade

I use records as placeholders in my life, almost like signposts. My parents tell me the first song that came on the radio when they brought me home from the hospital was Concrete Blonde’s Happy Birthday. Later, Joey would soundtrack their divorce. My sister and I would harmonise as Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road played in our family’s Holden EH. At the end of long car trips, I’d pretend I was asleep to be carried inside. 

In primary school, teased for not listening to what my friends considered cool, I’d beg for the latest So Fresh albums. During high school, my best friend and I would steal bottles of our parents’ red wine, smoke cigarettes and listen to the Stones, middle fingers high in the air. 

When I was 19, I fell in love with The National’s sixth full-length album, Trouble Will Find Me. A page in my notebook from the time reads, “I met a boy", in the top left, “But he is leaving," in the bottom right. Deep, I know. 

The bar where we met was one I had been to many times. It was dirty and dark and I was young and fearless. My friends and I had plans that spanned the world. No one would tie us down. But then he moved overseas. It was July – I can’t remember the date – and through the angst and the loss, through the "Tylenol and beer", I posed and personified a question: can you ritualise destruction? 

With Trouble Will Find Me, it seemed to me that The National were asking the same question. The trio of Alligator, Boxer and High Violet had already cemented the band’s status, and comfortable position, within the indie-rock scene. They’d always spoken to a sense of middle-class ennui: sad dads singing sad songs about sad things. But there was something looser, rawer, more personal about Trouble Will Find Me for me – it was there soundtracking my very existence, getting into my bones: “Hey Jo, sorry I hurt you/But they say love is a virtue, don’t they?” Matt Berninger’s self-deprecating introspection took the fore, the lyrics dancing with metaphors, and set to urgent, pulsing drums from Bryan Devendorf. Berninger spoke of the impossibility of human relationships, of the juxtaposition between grand symbolism and everyday observations. He described the beauty in the monotonous and banal, and in the ugly and most human parts of us laid bare.

For the Brooklyn-based band, Trouble Will Find Me wasn’t formed by the usual studio storms. They were in a period where the pressure was off, guitarist and pianist Aaron Dessner writing music “his kid would like to hear”, Berninger reacting to it “in a very visceral, immediate, infantile way”. 

What they created is therefore, as a whole, calmer and more cohesive than their earlier work. It smudges the harsh human emotion of trying, and sometimes failing, to find your place in the world with a sense of resignation to that fact – finding belonging in spite of it, and intimacy. It was something I found comfort in. At that time, as Berninger sings in Don’t Swallow The Cap, I was placing everything I loved on the table, everything I loved out to sea.

Trouble Will Find Me is not necessarily a record that represents the music of the decade. It was nominated but didn't win a Grammy; The National's next album, Sleep Well Beast, won Best Alternative Album in 2018. It might not even be my favourite album by the band. So why pick it? It’s a deeply personal choice. It’s all about the way it makes me feel, rather than an objective assessment of its cultural worth. It’s in the way I’d wake up hungover and bleary-eyed on a Sunday morning to WhatsApp messages that read, “I should live in salt for leaving you”; in the way I lean into its corniness. When the boy from the notebook returned from the UK the next year, we exchanged Christmas presents. We had bought each other the same album on vinyl, one of which now hangs framed in our bedroom. The four words, 'Trouble will find me,' are tattooed on my right tricep. We will dance as husband and wife for the first time to This Is The Last Time.