The National new album Sleep Well Beast: Band share dark new song and music video for 'Guilty Party'

'I'm no holiday'

The National have released the second single from their forthcoming album Sleep Well Beast.

Following on from 'The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness', 'Guilty Party' is a more sombre offering, with frontman Matt Berninger focusing on the pain of a marriage falling apart for no particular reason, and how time can be allowed to pass without reconciliation.

"Another year gets away," he sings. "Another summer of love.

"I don't know why I care. We miss it every summer."

'Guilty Party' has a glitchy opening and electronic drums initially, a departure for the band that sounds a little like recent Radiohead.

As for the video, it's "a dream about memory and the degradation of memory; it’s about distance in time and space,” says director Casey 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."

Sleep Well Beast will be something of a break-up album.

"It’s about marriage, and it’s about marriages falling apart," Berninger previously told NME.

"I’m happily married, and but it’s hard, marriage is hard and my wife and I are writing the lyrics together about our own struggles and it’s difficult to write, but it’s saving my marriage. Not saving my marriage, my marriage is healthy, but it’s good for everything! And so it’s gonna be a strange record, and I’m crazy about it.”

Sleep Well Beast (out 8 September) 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. Following their Glastonbury set and to celebrate the forthcoming album the band will be throwing a Guilty Party at Basilica Hudson on 14 and 15 July.