For so many people out there, the Midwest gets its hooks in you, refusing to let go. Matt Berninger, frontman of the National (a Brooklyn band by way of Cincinnati), spent ten years living in Los Angeles before moving to Connecticut. His lifestyle may be better suited to the coasts, especially with this most recent move, filled with days spent outside, painting, reading, and smoking weed, but he always finds himself drawn back to middle America.
Get Sunk, his second solo effort, comes after a period of writer’s block and self-disgust that started around 2020. Upon finding his voice, he composed a number of songs, even reworking older compositions with a renewed sense of creativity. Berninger shared that his ever-evolving and amorphous identity is the driving force behind the album. Although Get Sunk features several collaborations, including Berninger’s work with producer and engineer Sean O’Brien, the LP feels like a unified whole, distinct from his work with the National but equally thoughtful, measured, and masterful.
The record contains a surprising number of references to Indiana, where Berninger spent his summers at his aunt and uncle’s farm with his five cousins. As “Frozen Oranges” recounts, they would hide in creeks and crack open geodes, surrounded by Osage orange trees. The nature that surrounded still lives inside of him, like the tobacco leaves he chewed as a kid or the crackle of a blazing campfire. These tunes had been simmering beneath the surface, which is where Berninger ultimately went to unearth them.
If there was any concern about Berninger not having much to say, he puts those thoughts to bed on “Nowehere Special”, a spoken word number in the spirit of Tindersticks‘ Stuart Staples mumbled musings (a completely different style to Craig Finn‘s fully fleshed out stories). Like “Smoke Detector” from the National’s Laugh Track (2023), one gets the sense that Berninger could go on and on if nobody had the foresight to rein him in. The track also features a good hook to keep things grounded.
Like Berninger’s first effort, Serpentine Prison (2021), Get Sunk includes a handful of standout tracks, including the stirring “Bonnet of Pins”, the touching “Little By Little”, and the valiant “Times of Difficulty”. Quietly, “Silver Jeep” may be the most moving track on the record, with its mournful horns, strings, and Ronboy’s understated vocals. The only misstep is the record’s second single, “Breaking Into Acting”, featuring Hand Habits, a stagnant and rather on-the-nose critique of performance. However, like any Berninger tune, it has the potential to be somebody else’s favorite.
Matt Berninger takes another sophisticated step forward on an album that boasts some of his best songwriting to date. The imagery conjured on Get Sunk, and the feelings it evokes, is never meant to come into sharp focus, as visions flit in and then fade out again, like the flicker of a campfire across a clearing at dusk. The songs offer catharsis to listeners, yes, but they also serve as a kind of therapy for the songwriter, who mines his emotional depths to retrieve them, as he does so powerfully.