The National live at Manchester Apollo. September 2017. (Gary Mather / Live4ever)
The National will release their new album I Am Easy To Find on May 17th.
The concept for I Am Easy To Find can be traced back to September 2017 when director Mike Mills approached Matt Berninger with the intention of working together on an ambitious but unspecified project. The band’s hopes for a holiday were put to one side and this project eventually evolved into a 68-minute album which has been announced today and an accompanying film starring Alicia Vikander.
While the two sit side-by-side they are in fact, as Mills describes them, ‘Playfully hostile siblings that love to steal from each other’.
The world-weary timbre of Berninger so synonymous with The National has also been placed to one-side, handing over the spotlight instead to a variety of female vocalists. “Yes, there are a lot of women singing on this, but it wasn’t because, ‘Oh, let’s have more women’s voices’,” says Berninger.
“It was more, ‘Let’s have more of a fabric of people’s identities’. It would have been better to have had other male singers, but my ego wouldn’t let that happen.”
