New York Times leaks secret new National LP that somebody lost in a bar

This week’s New York Times Sunday magazine preview on the website is an insightful and revealing piece on the National.

Matt Berninger's lyric notebook for new album

Among other neat details are the shot of Matt’s lyric notebook (above), the fact that Matt’s wife edited articles for The New Yorker until recently and an interesting trick (attributed to Ringo Starr) involving tearing apart pillowcases.

The parts of the piece about the music and recording the new album are well worth reading, but in between there’s a somewhat trite hard-working-Midwestern-band-made-good-in-the-harsh-world-of-rock-n-roll story that you can skip if you want to make the (longish) piece quite a bit shorter.

But the coolest thing is that they are currently streaming the entire new album, which won’t be available in U.S. stores until May 11.

I think it sounds great, but you can listen for yourself until April 27.