The National: "We are the sound of the apocalypse!" | The music

TA few minutes before the National are expected on the stage of the Café de la Danse in Paris, the news is announced: Our Lady is on fire. The inner thinking of the Grammy Award-winning American alternative rock band is a flash of disaster. They were a fledgling group in Brooklyn when September 11th arrived; they are in Paris tonight, four years after the massacre at the Bataclan Theater and two years after the bombing of the Manchester Arena in the UK. The group's singer, Matt Berninger, is convinced that it is a hate-motivated crime and he visualizes aircraft in detonation and mass shots. Multi-instrumentalist Bryce Dessner moved to Paris in 2015 and has flashbacks on the Bataclan. "Are we really going to play?" He asks himself.

Filmmaker Mike Mills, National Creative Director for this year, looks at the dramatic images, recalls the churches in flames during World War II and feels that we are in the 1930s, illiberal rhetoric everywhere, dismayed by the fact than another hit. Meanwhile, bassist Scott Devendorf had received a text before an article was sent to him by a friend in the United States, in which it was written, "Our Lady on Fire." He thought the Notre Dame baseball team was hurting his opponents.

Half an hour later, the Nationalists play a new song on stage, Hairpin Turns, a haunting lament on the piano. "What are we going through? You and me, implore Berninger in his sad baritone. "All other houses in the street are on fire / Days of brutalism and hairpin bends …"

It seems that we are becoming a generation disaster, with each person over the age of 10 being globally adapted to the threat, anxiety, paranoia and the impending apocalypse. In the streets of Paris today, protesters of Extinction Rebellion brandish flags illustrating the logo of their timer. Since 1999, the National is the sound of human grief, emotional boredom diggers (or Radiohead in the United States via REM, Nick Cave and Joy Division). The year of their 20th birthday, while the existential sadness of humanity seems to deepen day by day, the National are the ideal group for those times, right? "The sound of the apocalypse!" Hurts Devendorf. "There is something to that. We are therapists in these times. Maybe no, we are not qualified! "

Twenty-four hours earlier, at Pin-Up Studios in Paris, Mills directs the music video for Hairpin Turns, band members who perform solo in a minimalist white space. According to Peter Berninger, they should not even be here, because of the long period of time after their world tour for 2017, the world's quietly huge No. 1 album, Sleep Well Beast, left them "exhausted, exhausted batteries ", according to Berninger. Instead, they accepted a visual collaboration offer via e-mail from the end of 2017 Mills, the 53-year-old director nominated for the Oscars in 2016 (and National Life Scientist). The result, I Am Easy to Find, is a 24-minute film (the life of a woman in crucial moments, elegantly interpreted by Alicia Vikander, Oscar winner) and a hypnotic album orchestrated by Mills composed of six singers (inspired by the character of Vikander).

Two will join them on stage for two concerts in Paris: the former Bowie bassist, Gail Ann Dorsey, and the singer of This Is the Kit, Kate Staples, alongside Bryce's wife, l & # 39; French singer-songwriter Pauline De Lassus (and a string section of seven). For the five-man Ohio troupe, which has experienced a famous fight against infighting, and now lives across the United States and Europe, the result, Berninger shudders, is both a "reboot" creative "and a more universal prism for his male neuroses.

At Pin-Up, Berninger, 48, has a new best friend, Hopper, seven, Mills' long-haired son, standing in front of a monitor screaming, uh, encouragement to his new bearded boyfriend. "Matt!" He shouts. "You look really good … because I can not see your face!"

"Hey, look at this …" Berninger answers (Isla's father, 10 years old), letting his microphone fold in half with a comedy sound effect. It is a relaxed and optimistic behavior that you do not expect from the American Bard of Despair, a teenager obsessed with Morrissey / Smiths who gave up his career as a well-paid graphic designer at age 28 for the chaos of musical life.

Aaron Dessner, multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter / producer, explains, along with his twin brother Bryce, the intriguing ancestry of his twin brother, a line of Scots, Jews and Americans. The twins are the musical heart of the National, virtuoso musicians poured into a complex melancholy. Ask Aaron if their propensity for sadness might be in their memory, the DNA of the persecuted peoples, and Bryce intervenes, smiling broadly. "I think that by 2019, as middle-aged white men, we would have a hard time calling ourselves persecuted in any way. So no!"

The morning after the fire of Notre Dame, Dessners are sitting at breakfast in a fashionable hotel, a shy and eloquent couple. Aaron lives between Copenhagen and upstate New York (where he houses his Long Pond wood frame studio). He will soon move to Paris with his wife and three young children to join his twin brother. In the United States, at school, he decided to turn off the news on the radio "because I do not want them to hear about children in cages and mass shootings." Bryce, who lives two blocks from Notre Dame, saw the symbolism in the dramatic events of last night. "A cathedral melting," he laments. "When so many institutions collapse, the basic concepts of liberalism are as if everything you think is permanent can be erased."

Mills' influence on the nation's permanent melancholy sound, he thinks, does not erase or erase it further, with "baroque and choral arrangements," he says. "And he put a lot of tension in the group – all of a sudden, there was this higher authority." Today, Aaron says that his connection to musical sadness may be innate after all. "I suffered depression in high school," he says. "It's clinical. I was a lucky kid, a nice family, nobody did anything wrong. But from the beginning, writing music with Bryce was a therapy. This is the reason why a lot of our music is meditative: layers, rhythms, patterns. "

He studied the phenomena of twins, how "a twin will manifest itself [depression]. I have this tendency and I actively fought. In 2016, he painted Painter of a Panic Attack at Frightened Rabbit and saw singer Scott Hutchison commit suicide in 2018. A chaotic creative lifestyle, he knows, can exacerbate things. "There is a toll in this life, without structure or control," he says – perhaps another reason why twins must be geographically close. "There are deep friendships in the group but it could end tomorrow," he notes. "For Bryce and me, the main reason we make music is to be together."

Berninger and Mills are sitting next to each other on a hotel bed, legs apart, moaning like teenagers, as befits old friends, although they be foreign until 2017. "It was like we were getting an email from Bruce Springsteen! , in stark contrast to the distraught neurotic that he sketches so deftly in song. Mills listens with enthusiasm as a Berninger Dam ensues, during these "brutal eras", from the rise of world fascism, from the "increased violence of language and thought" and its admiration for children "who are not yet ruined".

Like Dessners, art is their personal therapy. "Art is like, what do you think when you thought?" says Berninger. "What you desire, what you fear to lose. These are complicated mental questions. Put in all that you do not understand, that you can not understand. "

Mills' easy-to-find film is both a simple concept and a clever and unique concept. Vikander is convincing (and moving) as she represents a baby woman to grandmother, without the magic of CGI. Mills' work is often centered on women, which he attributes to having grown up with older sisters (while his father, after the death of his mother, found himself gay at the age of 18). 75 years old). "My problem is not to understand women," he smiles, "but still trying." Mills' creative direction for the album I Am Easy to Find was non-musical, his contribution "as a sophisticated cheerleader, "vetoing tired ideas or cries. "Cool!" In encouragement.

"It sounded like a National break," enthused Berninger, who mainly worked from his home in Los Angeles, co-writing lyrics with his wife Carin Besser, a Mills cheerleader with Aaron Long Pond, "what was good for us, good for Mike, not being in the middle of us fighting!" Producers are often there to help make it a success We were like, Mike, we never it's clear that we do not need these hits, so what's the good art? "

Given the perpetual creative struggles, you wonder if he thinks one day to stop the group. "We think about it all the time," he warns, alarming, before tempering his momentum. "We just need to restart, a lot."

As the two men get up from bed, you wonder what the National will do for the next restart when Mills returns to the shoot? "I'll be sitting," jokes Berninger, "behind him. "

Devendorf (brother of national drummer Bryan, who spends interviews) in another hotel room alone, questions what happens when a group does not struggle anymore, while the struggle fuels so often creativity. "You can become lazy. I know this concept! "He's laughing. "People love to live too high on pork. But music always brings us joy. Devendorf is a twisted character who openly mocks Berninger's original lyric ideas for a new six-minute autobiographical song, Not in Kansas. "It was 12 minutes" he laughs. "Really? You're fucking welcome! Mike Mills was mentioned, Mike Mills of REM and a massage therapist. What is this laundry list? "

Bryce often thinks of life beyond the national: he is now a prolific composer for world orchestras, recently immersed in the Minimalist Dream House project with Thom Yorke and other virtuosos of classical music. "Most of the biggest rock bands have never spent ten years," he notes, alone at breakfast. "Egos, desires, creative ambitions – constantly insist that the most important cause is a challenge! Everyone has had their chapter of the fight really with it. After that, there will probably be a long pause. "

His personal priorities change. Recently, he saw "our family getting involved". He is reluctant to elaborate but says "just the relationship with our parents, see things you always hoped to be there, suddenly, not there". It's the new parenting that changes everything, because he was the last of the National to become a father two years ago. Today, between the orchestra and the brass section, there are 12 children.

"Every time you go on a tour, you take time away from those little people who really appreciate it," he says. "You obviously do not get those years back. So it's really difficult. When you're 22, the group is your life, but there are more important things than the group now, there really are. "

He questions what remains to be done for the National, they are sometimes outsiders of the alt-rock group who now form a global group of the arena and who have starred the London & O2 Arena and the Royal Albert Hall. "Dreams you never expect, especially our group, "he says." So it's getting, are we going to go to Everest now? "

What is Everest, now, for them? "Um. I think … "A huge pause. "I think the group is at a crossroads," he finally answers. "The National has been a must for all my adult life. One day, I will not have it. Everything in life, now, certainly pulls on the fabric. It can become more difficult. Allowing others to realize dreams elsewhere, as artists, as human beings. We do not expect to tour the stadiums of the Rolling Stones. So, Everest? Perhaps headlining Central Park. In fact, we have titled Central Park … "

He stops, wary of this sudden threatening conversation. "But a group is a family," he concludes. "You have to take care of your family. It's now our Everest. And that's something I do not want to lose. "

In the Olympia's scarlet-colored theater, contrasting with the dark, serene atmospheres of everyone, I'm easy to find, Berninger laughs, accidentally spills his mic stand and yells, "I'm pissed off! comic, the back of a hand squeezed dramatically on his forehead, new song Where Is Her Head seeing him howling, again and again: "I think I'm breaking a wall!"

When they close with Fake Empire, their beloved non-hit, Paris is finally on its feet in musical recognition. The three singers, string sections and brass, are now gone, the National is again an apocalyptic rock band composed of five people. Bryce, in the last notes, pushes his guitar in the air, creating an iconic and provocative silhouette. Like Notre Dame, the original gothic jewel in the heart of National remains. For the moment.

I'm easy to find fate on May 17th