The National have announced plans for their first live show since 2024 – check out the details below.
- READ MORE: Matt Berninger: All that’s left when you’re gone are your ideas
The band will be performing a special one-off show as part of AB100 festival in Sans Sebastian.
Dubbed “The National And Friends”, the event will be staged at the Kursaal Donostia on October 18 and will include performances from the band alongside the likes Kevin Morby, Ben Howard, Jon Hopkins, Mina Tindle, Ragnar Kjartansson, Arcade Fire‘s Richard Reed Perry, Anaïs Mitchell and many more.
Tickets go on sale on August 3 at 11.30am Central European Time (10.30 BST) and can be purchased here.
The band last dropped two albums in 2023 – ‘The First Two Pages Of Frankenstein‘ and ‘Laugh Track‘.
Speaking in 2024, they told NME that they were in a “very creative space” and in the “gardening phase” of writing new material.
Since then Berninger has released a new solo album ‘Get Sunk‘. He revealed at the time that a lot of the lyrics for his second solo album were written on baseballs.
“For me, writing on the baseballs is making me a better writer just by physically slowing the writing process down,” he told NME in 2025. “My brain sits on a word just a hair longer when I have to write it on a baseball. My brain considers the word and goes, ‘No, this is a better word. Don’t go left, go backwards’. When you’re writing on a baseball, you have a minute to avoid the cliché.
“It’s like writing a novel with one finger. Maybe that’s the way Hemingway wrote and why his sentences are so good? Because he just fucking thought about every word.”
Aaron Dessner has also worked on a number of albums including Mumford & Sons‘ ‘Prizefighter‘, and Gracie Abrams‘ ‘The Secret Of Us’ and ‘Daughter From Hell‘, Florence + The Machine‘s ‘Everybody Scream‘ and Brandi Carlile‘s ‘Returning To Myself’ in recent years.
He recently denied claims that Abrams’ song ‘Death Wish’ is about Taylor Swift, who he has also previously worked with.
