“It’s the runt,” Bryce agreed.

“It’s Melky Cabrera,” Aaron revised, referring to a former Yankees outfielder who never quite found his role and eventually was traded.

Image WORDS INTO SONG Matt Berninger’s notebook of lyrics, which are generally the final element added to a National song. Credit... Collier Schorr for The New York Times

“It’s at least weird,” Bryce offered.

Then they hit on something, “a kind of tribal, throbbing sound,” as Bryan put it. This version required a soft, rhythmically complex drum part from him, and the others cheered, “Go, Seabiscuit!” as he settled in behind his kit. They were all wearing jeans and what appeared to be Truman-era sweaters. Bryan stands well over six feet to begin with, but like all talented drummers, when he’s working he seems to physically expand. Watching him now, Bryce said, “That’s where he’s most at home.” Bryan is the fellow band member whose intelligence and personality the others find most compelling. His nickname among them is Party of One, an allusion to how much beer he can hold, and also to more elusive qualities. For most of the Bridgeport weeks, while the others sat near the producer, Katis, at the sound board, Bryan was off hidden in a far corner with two sticks, tapping to himself. “Bryan doesn’t respond to any of the usual negotiations,” Bryce says.

The drum part Bryan kept producing for “Lemonworld” was landing too hard, and so he improvised. Summoning an old trick much favored by the Beatles, who, as Bryan noted, wrapped Ringo Starr’s skins with tea towels, Bryan went downstairs, rummaged around in Katis’s linen closet and found some pillowcases, which he proceeded to tear up and tape to his snare and both toms. These mutes cushioned the sound and made it somehow lusher. At nightfall, they listened, and what they heard made them all giddy. “The Stones would put a shaker with that guitar, synch it way down and it would be hot!” Aaron cried. So they added that too. “My pillowcases!” Katis suddenly noticed. But he didn’t really mind. Now they were downright chesty, strutting around the attic in their socks, “heading for a grand showdown with the Dark Lord,” as Katis put it. Off went “Lemonworld” by e-mail to Matt, whose texted response was “Twee Smurf!” Elaborating later he added: “It’s a great dark weird murky pop song, but it doesn’t lift off. We need to embrace its simplicity, not turn it into an art piece.” In the cold, clear light of Bridgeport dawn, the twins agreed with him. “It doesn’t sound like the way that we play,” Aaron said with a sigh.

THE NATIONAL HAVE been a band for more than 10 years, but they have been playing together in some form for practically their entire lives. They were all comfortable, middle-class Cincinnati kids from prosperous East Side suburbs, except Matt, who, although his father is a lawyer, lived on the grittier West Side — “the haves and the have not,” as Aaron sarcastically puts it.As twins with bowl haircuts, Aaron and Bryce shared one baseball-card collection, played all games side by side and slept in a room with identical pairs of fixtures and furniture pieces. Every morning, Bryce would take a shower and then leave the water on for Aaron to follow. They were so close, always understanding each other in such a primary way, that when they communicated, other people couldn’t always make out what they were saying. (In the band, this is known as the twins’ “pillow talk.”) Today, though they live in separate Brooklyn houses, their bond remains so intense that when they return to Ohio with their girlfriends, they would rather the four of them sleep (platonically) in their two childhood beds than take advantage of the guest room.

At 13, the Dessner brothers were the two guards on the Cincinnati Country Day middle-school basketball team. The team’s center was Bryan, and soon he was coming by after school to play music with them. There was a mystique about Bryan. He arrived, he drummed wordlessly for hours and he left. Rumor had it that he burned down the family house. (It turned out to be only part of the house.) Bryan’s observation about Aaron and Bryce was that “the twins make rock ’n’ roll into sports competition.” A few years later, Scott was studying art at the University of Cincinnati, where he and Matt became best friends. Of all the National members, Scott always had the best record collection, and Matt says when Scott played him singers like Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus and Robert Pollard of Guided by Voices, he saw how vocal character could compensate for limited range. “People say there’s a monotony to the way I sing,” Matt says, “and I totally understand that. But maybe it’s more entertaining to watch the pole-vaulter hit the bar than go over it. Hitting the notes is less important than the attempt. If you believe what you sing, if the notes are right is insignificant. ”

Cincinnati gave him a narrative edge. “Ohio is a very common American experience,” Matt says. “It’s much closer than New York to the typical American perspective. It’s right in the middle, and there are unbelievable tensions there — social, racial, political. The Robert Mapplethorpe and Larry Flynt obscenity trials, the race riots — it’s a crucible there for some reason.” Degrees in hand, Scott and Matt moved to New York in 1996, where they found graphic-design jobs. Every day, showered and blazered, they went off to work. They were white-collar professionals who made weekend rock ’n’ roll.

The twins, too, were eager to say, “Goodbye, Cincinnati.” When Bryce was admitted to Yale and Aaron to Columbia, the impending separation was hard on both of them, especially Aaron, who said he fell into a clinical depression. “I don’t think either of us realized how traumatic it would be,” he remembers. “In college, I immediately rushed into a superserious relationship.” Aaron studied Jewish history at Columbia and then, after graduation, worked in Yale’s Holocaust archive. Bryce was in New York, living on $13,000 a year, teaching classical guitar. Bryan was downtown, editing books for the Soho Press. Out in their Brooklyn loft, Scott and Matt wanted to record songs together on an eight-track. They needed a drummer. Scott called his brother. Bryan called Aaron and Bryce. The sound was so good, soon enough the five of them went National. “We’ve regretted the name many times,” Matt says. “The truth is we wanted the name to be meaningless. We don’t have a collective perspective or an idea. It’s like the first time we heard the name ‘Nirvana,’ it sounded like it would be the worst kind of emotional, faux-passionate record, and then we heard the record, and the word ‘nirvana’ changed.”