Album Review: Matt Berninger, Get Sunk

Together, Get Sunk and 2020’s Serpentine Prison make a pair of Matt Berninger solo records. Doubtless they will provide the backbone of the live set when he touches down at Vicar Street for two dates in August, one of which is already sold out.

Irish music fans have an abiding love of both Berninger and his band The National. Here his lyrical flair remains as strong as ever. On Get Sunk lead single ‘Bonnet Of Pins’, it’s the story within the song – “She sidewinders through the room to me / With a real cigarette and a styrofoam coffee/ She’s still wearing her father’s feather jacket” – that really punches.

It’s all wrapped in a beautiful sonic landscape, crafted by Grammy-winning producer and co-writer Sean O’Brien, and honed by some heavy hitters including Meg Duffy (Hand Habits), who performs a wonderful turn on the splendidly soporific ‘Breaking Into Acting’.

Elsewhere, ‘Frozen Oranges’ is a sublime piece of songwriting, a heady rush of surrealist consciousness that glides you into a Saturday somewhere in Berninger’s past. ‘Silver Jeep’, meanwhile, is a heartbreaker delivered in that goddamned beautiful baritone, which sounds like it has lived a hundred American lives.

8/10

Out now