Matt Berninger

Matt Berninger is the vocalist and lyricist for Grammy Award-winning band The National. His songwriting has long garnered praise for its poignant clarity, jagged-edged wit and intimately emotive melodies. The band’s career spans ten studio albums, including First Two Pages of Frankenstein and Laugh Track, both issued in 2023. Late 2024 saw the release of The National’s first proper live album, Rome. Together with his wife Carin Besser, Berninger produced the band’s 2013 feature-length documentary Mistaken for Strangers, directed by Matt’s brother Tom. Outside of The National, Berninger formed EL VY with Brent Knopf (Menomena) in 2014. The duo released their debut album Return to the Moon the following year. Berninger’s “gorgeous” (Rolling Stone) solo debut, Serpentine Prison, came out in 2020, produced by the legendary Booker T. Jones. His second solo effort, Get Sunk, is due to be released in May 2025.

Berninger is also a visual artist, and spent a decade as a creative director in New York City. There’s a fluidity between his work as a painter/sculptor and lyricist/vocalist: he paints on white boards of song titles and lyrics while working in the studio, and he created a massive canvas of a pink rabbit before he ever wrote the National song of the same name. Berninger's latest medium is baseballs, on which he pens lyrics and poems across their white leather and red stitching. His songwriting is deeply rooted in his artmaking, as both lean toward fragmentary, collage-like curiosity. There is a porous boundary between artist, poet, lyricist and singer, and all contribute to Berninger’s creative wanderings.