THE National have come a long way in their 16 years as a band both sonically and physically. The Ohio-born, Brooklyn-based dive bar specialists, now Grammy-nominated festival headliners, have members living as far from the USA as Copenhagen.

Any struggles to recall the heights and highlights of The National’s output so far can be put aside however, with 2017’s Sleep Well Beast, the band’s seventh album, serving as a retrospective of all that’s great about the melancholic rockers.

Lead single The System Only Dreams In Total Darkness and standout track Day I Die feature intricate guitar lines and effortless choruses both rousing and poignant at the same time and are destined to be instant live favourites. On the former, Matt Berninger’s cry of "I cannot explain it/ Any other, any other way" represents the album’s emotional peak and will surely become a communal anthem".

If this is The National in their most recent guise – sage, confident and fully aware of their powers – then Guilty Party and Carin At The Liquor Store, a John Cheever-referencing love song, dreamily bring us back to the booze-soaked angst of the band’s midlife. The angry, energising Turtleneck then transports us even further into the past.

However, there is still much progression to be found: The prominence given to electronic beats adds smart, contemporary variation to the band’s sound, while Berninger’s lyrics, co-written with his wife Carin Besser (one-time fiction editor at The New Yorker) feel more self-doubting than ever.

It’s an uncertainty reflective of that created by recent global developments, with The National never ones to shy away from the political. But ultimately the album’s most successful moments are its quieter ones, exposing the disappointments of stale relationships and the one-note reality of middle age.

Review by Adam Steel