The National are five New York based friends from Ohio, who started making music in 1999. New album 'Alligator' highlights Matt Berninger's potent baritone as he intones about matters fraught, funny and sad, but the record is not simply gothic or miserablist - more like the plays of Tennessee Williams, it is full of peculiar intimacies and awkward grace.

They're stuck between the country and the city, but not in the suburban or exurban senses, their music reveals the parallels between small-town everybody-knows -everybody drama and big-city alienation.