In the summer of 2006, five men from Ohio checked into a recording studio in Bridgeport, Connecticut with one problem: they had no songs.
They had a producer they trusted, a label that believed in them, and a growing critical reputation built on years of grinding. What they didn't have were the tracks for their next album. So they stayed. For two months, they lived at Tarquin Studios (guitarist Aaron Dessner's preferred description of the period was "incredibly difficult"), and when they eventually left for Brooklyn, they had little more than scattered sketches and a gathering sense of dread.
The album they were trying to make was Boxer. The band was The National.
Getting there had taken the best part of a decade.
Cincinnati, 1991
The story starts not in a basement or a rehearsal room but in a graphic design classroom. Matt Berninger and Scott Devendorf met at the University of Cincinnati's DAAP programme (the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning), where they bonded over all-nighters, strong coffee, and the kind of music obsession that spreads fastest when you're spending twelve hours a day on typography.
"I became a lover of music at UC," Berninger later recalled. "Being around all these creative people, drinking coffee and listening to rock music while we worked on design projects all night long. That was where I really dove in and started studying musicians and obsessing about the writing."
The design training never left him. To this day, Berninger describes songs in visual terms: when a song is "too blue," he says, it needs "a little yellow." The drums, in his framework, are the grid. The vocals are the typography inside the work.
Aaron and Bryce Dessner (twin brothers, both musicians) were elsewhere in Cincinnati, cycling through bands across the late 1990s. Their most recent outfit, Project Nim, had just broken up. Bryan Devendorf, Scott's brother, drummed. Through the connection between the Devendorf brothers, the two groups found each other.
In 1999, all five moved to Brooklyn.
Brooklyn, Jobs, No One Watching
The New York they arrived in was already mid-explosion. The Strokes released Is This It in 2001. Interpol put out Turn on the Bright Lights in 2002. The music press was declaring a British Invasion in reverse. Downtown Manhattan had a scene, a sound, and a narrative. None of which included five quiet Ohioans with day jobs.
Berninger worked in advertising. The Dessner brothers held down whatever work they could. They booked shows and fell on their faces. They started their own label, Brassland Records, because there was no one else willing to put their music out. Their self-titled debut album, released on Brassland in 2001, was recorded before they had ever played a single live show.
"There were times when I said, 'I can't be 35 and playing to 10 people and sleeping in youth hostels.'"
The early years accumulated quietly. According to band legend, they were once paid not to perform. The promoter apparently decided it wasn't worth it. They watched The Strokes and Interpol break through and described themselves as "always on the outside of a scene looking in." Their second album, Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers (2003), was better. It landed them a French radio session and some year-end notices from Uncut and the Chicago Tribune, but it didn't change their trajectory in any meaningful way.
In 2004, two things happened. They signed to Beggars Banquet Records (the British independent home of Bauhaus and The Cult), because running their own label had become "too complicated." And they quit their day jobs.
It was, as these decisions tend to be, both a relief and a gamble.
Alligator, 2005
The album that came out of this period, Alligator (released April 2005), is the record that made The National into The National. One retrospective put it plainly: it was "the first record on which The National are The National."
Recorded partly in Brooklyn apartments and partly at Tarquin Studios with producer Peter Katis (who had worked with Interpol on Turn on the Bright Lights), Alligator had a rawness and urgency the first two albums lacked. Berninger was writing about adult life with adult frustration: the anxiety of your thirties approaching, relationships breaking apart and coming back together, a country under a president he found terrifying.
The closing track, "Mr. November," was written in one hour in the aftermath of John Kerry's 2004 election defeat. Berninger later said he wrote it about "the anxiety and pressure leading up to the election." It ends with him screaming the phrase over and over, something the earlier, quieter records would never have allowed.
Alligator appeared on year-end lists at Uncut and Planet Sound. It sold over 200,000 copies worldwide. It built the platform that made everything after it possible and, crucially, it introduced the band to the Brooklyn music community that would help shape what came next.
Among those neighbours, in the Ditmas Park district where several band members now lived, was a young songwriter named Sufjan Stevens.
Boxer, or: How to Nearly Give Up
In the summer of 2006, with Alligator behind them and a new album to make, The National moved into Tarquin Studios with Peter Katis and nothing else. No songs. No finished lyrics. Just the intention to make something.
"It was incredibly difficult," Aaron Dessner said in an interview at the time. "We could have been patient and just let [the songs] evolve. Alligator was more like that. It had more songs already written before we really tried to record them. I don't think we'd do it again, the way we did Boxer, because it was nearly a disaster. We came very close to giving up."
Two months in Bridgeport produced almost nothing usable. They returned to Brooklyn with sketches. Over the autumn and winter, Aaron and Bryce reworked what they had in their home studio, pulling in collaborators: Thomas Bartlett (who records as Doveman), Australian composer Padma Newsome of Bryce Dessner's chamber ensemble Clogs (who had played on Alligator), and Stevens, who lived just streets away.
Stevens' contribution arrived in the most casual manner possible. He came over for a day. Bryce called him, they explained what they needed, and Stevens sat down and played. His fingerprints are on "Ada" and "Racing Like a Pro," two of the album's most delicate moments. "Melody just kinda comes really easy for him," Bryce recalled.
The track that would open the album almost didn't make it either. "Fake Empire" had existed for over a year in a form that felt incomplete: a piano figure built on an unusual four-over-three polyrhythm (it sounds like it's in four, but it's in three), with a gap at the end that no one knew how to fill. More words didn't work. A different arrangement didn't work. Eventually, Bryce had an idea: what if there was a fanfare?
The band called Newsome, who was back in Australia. Newsome wrote a minimalist brass arrangement, spare and slightly strange, nodding to Steve Reich, and sent it across. They recorded the trumpets in Aaron's attic in Brooklyn. "That song just felt unfinished," Bryce said later, "and then we did that, and it was like this really amazing moment."
Even so, some lyrics didn't exist until the last possible second. "Squalor Victoria," one of the record's most propulsive tracks, received its words the night before mastering. Aaron recalled hearing the finished album for the first time in the car on the way to the mastering session: "I remember really only hearing the album for the first time on the way to mastering."
The Album
Boxer was released on 22 May 2007 on Beggars Banquet. It debuted at number 68 on the US Billboard chart, selling around 9,500 copies in its first week. Not a commercial smash, but enough to confirm that what the band had spent the past eighteen months fighting to make had found an audience.
The album cover is a photograph of the band performing at Peter Katis' wedding. Couples are dancing in the foreground. The band is mid-song on a small stage. It is an entirely ordinary scene, which is precisely the point: this is a band that plays at their producer's wedding, that records in attics and laundromats, that has been showing up and doing the work for eight years without any particular recognition.
The music reflected all of that. Boxer opens with "Fake Empire" (that polyrhythmic piano, the horns arriving late and suddenly making everything feel larger) and settles into a record about the particular sadness of middle-class American life: the sense that you're living inside something hollow without quite knowing how you got there, or how to get out. Berninger wrote it under the shadow of George W. Bush's second term. It sounded like grief with its suit still on.
Paste named it the best album of 2007. Pitchfork placed it at 17 in their end-of-year list. It has appeared on multiple albums-of-the-decade polls since.
The band made their television debut that July, performing "Fake Empire" on The Late Show with David Letterman. Then they went on tour, opening for Arcade Fire before becoming headliners in their own right.
"We Were a Little Bewildered"
A year after Boxer's release, an Obama campaign video coordinator named Hope Hall was preparing an introduction film for the Democratic National Convention in Denver. She needed a song to soundtrack 80,000 people on their feet. She had "Fake Empire" in her head.
The campaign licensed the song (negotiations ran until Hall was in the motorcade on the way to the stadium), and the instrumental version played as Obama walked out to accept his nomination. It played again at his victory rally in Grant Park, Chicago, on election night.
The National had written "Fake Empire" because Berninger was frightened about the state of America. It had been designed as a lament. Now it was scoring a moment of national optimism.
"We were a little bewildered," Berninger told The Guardian, "because the song is not patriotic by any means." When right-wing bloggers later attacked Obama for using an "unpatriotic" song, Aaron Dessner pointed out the obvious: "Do they know it's about how f***ed up America is and wanting to leave?"
That irony (a song about resignation repurposed as a song about hope) is very The National. It is music built for people who feel the gap between how things are and how they should be, which turns out to be a great many people.
"To have a little song you write when you're depressed about the world get used like that," Berninger said. "That's a big part of Boxer's legacy."
What to Buy
Boxer (2007)
The essential record. The 2007 Beggars Banquet pressing gets mixed reviews: some copies press beautifully, others less so. Later reissues on 4AD tend to be the more consistent versions to track down. The 33 1/3 book on the album (2022, by Ryan Pinkard) is also worth your time if you want the full oral history.
Alligator (2005)
The album that made Boxer possible. Rawer and louder in places ("Abel" and "Mr. November" are as unguarded as Berninger ever gets) but already carrying the fully-formed sound. The Beggars Banquet pressing holds up well. If you're building a National collection, start here before Boxer, not after.
High Violet (2010)
The record where everything got bigger. Arcade Fire's Richard Reed Parry, Sufjan Stevens, Bon Iver's Justin Vernon: all guests on an album that expanded the palette without losing the claustrophobic intimacy. "Bloodbuzz Ohio" and "Terrible Love" are the entry points. The 4AD pressing is the one to look for.