The National deal in anxiety; the soporific urbanity of rosy-minded fuzz put to the uncertain beat of a medium-sized American heart. Earlier albums rendered sociopathic worries curiously liberating. Screaming when his mind wasn't right, Matt Berninger was sure that he had all the wine. He would put a little something in his lemonade before going out alone into America, or ballerina on a coffee table cock in hand in a perversely burlesque piece of domesticated showmanship. Now, realising that ‘when I walk into a room/I do not light it up’,  a single ‘fuck’ reveals real loathing, underscoring needling self-deprecation, rising up and then sinking down with the ‘Demons’ into swelling melancholy. Trouble Will Find Me struggles with mortality, endings, finality. Constantly referencing the afterlife, it finds the band ‘Heavenfaced’; at the peak of their powers, but wondering whether they can ascend any further. They need not worry. Trouble Will Find Me finds them at their zenith.

As a five-piece, they know how to effortlessly swagger through a track, the kind of ‘dead devotion’ that rings out on ‘Don’t Swallow The Cap’. When drummer Bryan Devendorf defines songs, all they need is a chiming guitar line and directional piano to busy themselves behind the words’ inexorable stream-of-consciousness. When the melodies behind withdraw leaving only the vocal and drums, they push and pull against each other like stubborn magnets, as Berninger’s mind fights with the dynamic that won’t let it rest. ‘Sea Of Love’ comes closest to the triumphant rock scuzz of ‘Bloodbuzz Ohio’, overlaying guitars in a rough, vaunting crescendo with a humorous tinge: ‘Tell me how to reach you/What did Harvard teach you’. The same song plays with the debilitating qualities of affection: ‘They say love is a virtue, don’t they?’ as dead devotion’s partner, ‘careful fear’, reappears.

A lover’s imperviousness to emotion (‘Fireproof’), the drowning narcissism of a breakup (‘This Is The Last Time’), the dependency of companionship (‘I Need My Girl’); The National’s songs still adroitly tread the line between interaction and isolation. And yet something has changed on Trouble Will Find Me. Before the band would ‘stay inside until somebody finds us/Do whatever the TV tells us’- now they are on TV, subject to the masses who drink ‘Pink Rabbits’ and salivate at Berninger’s ‘television version of a person with a broken heart’. The ending is most telling. While High Violet ended with them trying to ‘explain it all to the geeks’, having needed to ‘hang their holiday rainbow lights in the garden’ on Boxer, now ‘they can just kiss off into the air’. Unmistakably huge and armed with cool self-confidence, they are ‘good and grounded’, and they can certainly light up a room. Trouble Will Find Me confirms that The National are the Great American Band of their time.