There is wry humour at work somewhere in The National camp, naming an album First Two Pages Of Frankenstein when your lead lyricist has just emerged from a debilitating period of writer’s block. Plus, one of the album’s singles is entitled ‘Your Mind Is Not Your Friend’. Frontman Matt Berninger was able to call on his wife Carin Besser as co-writer, as well as one Taylor Swift who worked with the band’s guitarist Aaron Dessner on her lockdown albums, Folklore and Evermore. Meanwhile, the others were feeling the distance imposed by covid.

‘Everyone lost course a little bit as to what was important,’ says bassist Scott Devendorf. ‘We were all a little bit adrift, so we felt for Matt. If you can’t write words then it’s hard to make songs that make sense for the group, so it was a period of trying to encourage him but also give him space to refind his muse.’

When he did, the band ended up with far more than First Two Pages Of Frankenstein. There was a whole other chapter to this work, additional songs worked up at soundchecks as The National resumed touring. Five months later, their ninth album was followed by a tenth, Laugh Track.

‘We were working on Laugh Track on the road,’ recalls Devendorf, ‘and as we played live more together, I think a lot of that energy and spirit made its way back into what we were working on. Frankenstein is more muted and insular in feeling. It’s just hard when there was a longer period of there not being a structure and then you start to fill in things and overwork them. In any band, if there is a good idea and a good feeling you are getting from it, you’re usually on the right path. But if it’s an exercise in musicianship, it’s sometimes a lost cause.’

So it was the worst of times, then the best of times for The National. Devendorf can go for that, given that he cites A Tale Of Two Cities as his favourite first pages of any novel. ‘Charles Dickens is the OG,’ he contends. The National are known for the slow-burn intensity of their music, with careers that have followed a similar pattern.

Devendorf and Berninger studied graphic design together at Cincinnati University with music more of an extra-curricular passion before they left successful roles to form The National in their late twenties in New York. ‘We definitely did not start the band for it to be a job,’ says Devendorf. ‘It started very casually with no real ambition other than we saw a lot of stuff happening around us in New York at that time: The Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Walkmen and all these bands in the early 2000s who were very exciting. It made us think that we could do something with it.’

Devendorf still takes a proprietary interest in the band’s sleeve design and visuals but he also indulges more esoteric tastes via his themed Grateful Dead DJ sets (as Grateful DJead). ‘I’m not a professional DJ, I’ll tell you that,’ he counters. And those National soundchecks have a lot to answer for, birthing jamming supergroup LNZNDRF with his brother, National drummer Bryan Devendorf, and touring keyboard player Ben Lanz. ‘We started it for fun, and at one point we had a National opener not be able to make a show, so LNZNDRF improvised for 30 minutes in the spirit of those Krautrock greats.’

The National are on tour Tuesday 2–Thursday 11 July; main picture: Graham MacIndoe.