High Violet

You don’t really need me to tell you that The National’s High Violet is one of the year’s most feverishly anticipated records, nor do you need it rehashed how 2005’s Alligator and 2007’s Boxer revealed their charms gradually, seeping into listener’s headphones and their hearts long after receiving initial spins. The enduring quality of the New Yorker’s previous long-players means that whether they like it or not, High Violet comes burdened with heavy expectation. It doesn’t just have to be a good album, it must be a brilliant one; it can’t just be better than what it follows, it needs to be an outright modern classic.

The National became popular in a very traditional way: by releasing some really good albums, then touring the hell out of them. They're boilerplate indie, free of hot new genre tags or feature-ready backstories, which is something their detractors derive great joy from pointing out. If the National are important, rather than merely good, it's for writing about the type of lived-in moments that rock bands usually don't write about that well. The characters in National songs have real jobs, have uninteresting sex, get drunk, and lie to one another. They do so during the regular course of a workaday week, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The National aren't "dad-rock" so much as "men's magazine rock": music chiefly interested in the complications of being a stable person expected to own certain things and dress certain ways.