The National
Sleep Well Beast

A pale sunset without the sun, a wooden house, the band inside rehearsing. Gray on gray. This is the cover of The National's seventh album, Sleep Well Beast, released in September 2017 and partially recorded at the Funkhaus Studio in Berlin and in the wilderness of Upstate New York. A home. As if the five from Cincinnati, Ohio, had taken total familiarity with their music, recognizing and inhabiting every corner of it. Reaching more or less simultaneously full artistic and human awareness. This is precisely where the magic of this album lies, able to speak with rare depth and sensitivity about ourselves and our times. Of plastic empires - the fake empires The National already sang about back in the days of Boxer, which "desire a passive population of consumers and spectators of politics, a community of people fragmented and isolated, incapable of undermining their power" (Noam Chomsky dixit) - and children growing up.

It talks about empires in the beautiful "Walk It Back," when distant voices, originally spoken at the White House by someone to Ron Sunskind who was there for the New York Times, coldly explain that "people like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we will act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and