The National Share New Single ‘Guilty Party’

Today, The National have released the single ‘Guilty Party’ off their forthcoming album Sleep Well Beast out on the 8th September via 4AD / Remote Control Records. Sleep Well Beast was produced by member Aaron Dessner with co-production by Bryce Dessner and Matt Berninger and recorded at Aaron’s Hudson Valley, NY studio, Long Pond. To celebrate the forthcoming album the band will be throwing a Guilty Party at Basilica Hudson on July 14^th and 15^th. The collaborative concert will be performed in the round and will feature Buke & Gase, Nadia Sirota, Mouse On Mars, SO Percussion and more.

Video artist Casey Reas will be contributing live projection mapping for the event. Reas also directed the video for single, ‘Guilty Party’. “The video is a dream about memory and the degradation of memory; it’s about distance in time and space,” says Reas. “Time moves forward, but then backward as memory. The image of the two-faced Roman god Janus, who can look into the past and future, is the core visual language.” Watch the video via the image below.

Last week in Paris and the UK, The National performed new material off the forthcoming album for audiences for the first time. Portions of their victorious main stage set at Glastonbury can be viewed via the BBC. NME said in reviewing the Glastonbury performance, “their set’s only flaw: it just all ended too soon. But the impact they made was immense. They’ve played the long game, and they’ve won. It’s time for the world’s biggest cult band to become a whole new beast.”