A lot of people hate the National. Maybe it’s the well-tailored suits and catalogue with its share of songs about coastal, upper-middle-class malaise. Or front man Matt Berninger’s monotone voice. And for those who have an aversion to Berninger’s baritone, there’s a lot to like on the band’s eighth studio record, I Am Easy to Find. He’s still on it, sharing his poetic insecurities. But he’s accompanied by a rotating cast of excellent women, from Sharon Van Etten to longtime Bowie backup singer and bassist Gail Ann Dorsey. It’s more than backing vocals, though: On most of the tracks, the female vocals are front and center. Berninger remains in the shadow. It’s the band’s most quiet and pretty record yet.

As the band members enter middle age, they’ve hit their stride. Between them, there are a dozen children. Side projects. Extended time apart. Long a product of (and shorthand for) upwardly mobile Brooklyn, the National—composed of two sets of brothers (drummer Bryan Devendorf and bassist Scott Devendorf, accompanied by twins Aaron and Bryce Dessner) plus Berninger—is no longer a New York band. They’ve decamped to Paris and Los Angeles and their hometown of Cincinnati. The band is quite literally a family, spread out across the globe. And when they get together, they argue and collaborate and workshop their ugly ideas. They fight. This time around, director Mike Mills co-produced the record and made a companion short film starring Academy Award winner Alicia Vikander, who is also on the album cover.

We talked with the candid and earnest Berninger about bringing more women into the fold, life on the road, and smoking weed.

Vanity Fair: I was going to start talking about the new record, but a good friend was recently telling me that she has listened to the National—really tried—and it’s just not for her. Which I hear a lot. Your music is polarizing, and I was wondering: Where does the antipathy toward the National come from?

Matt Berninger: There’s very rarely anything super off-putting or dissonant about the music. So I’m assuming it’s my voice that is sort of like, Yeah. That dude singing isn’t for me. I get it. I totally get it. I turn stuff off and judge it instantly all the time for very, very whatever reasons that are not really aesthetically connected, but just that subjectively turn me off. That’s my safe assumption.

So it’s your fault, not the rest of the guys.

I would assume it’s mostly my fault.

How have National crowds changed over the years? From Mercury Lounge, up to Royal Albert Hall and the Beacon, how have the crowds and audiences changed?

To be perfectly honest, I don’t know. When we started Mercury Lounge and all that stuff, most of the people were just our friends who were there out of sympathy. And then the friends started mixing with strangers. We didn’t really fit into any obvious or easy-to-package groups or gangs of other bands. We tried to! We tried to hang out with and be part of, like, Interpol’s hang, the Strokes’ scene, the Walkmen’s scene—all that. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Nobody really wanted us around. Except for the Walkmen, who tolerated us.

So I think we always just had misfits who didn’t really feel a part of some other cool group and always identified with us. After a while, we became a little bit symbolic of the awkward dude over in the corner that nobody’s really sure is cool or not. And I think a huge percentage—I think more than 70 percent of people actually feel like that person, you know?