The band has always sung about regret, but the new album has an elegiac feel. Illustration by Mike McQuade; Photograph from WENN / Alamy

Plenty of bands address the extravagance and the ferocity of youth, but far fewer sing about being grownup. Since 2001, the National, an indie-rock group from Ohio, has given voice to a particular kind of midlife melancholy: what it means to have a good job and a reliable partner, and nevertheless feel choked and despairing. This might seem absurd at first—privilege is privilege, after all—but the emotional depth of the band’s work says something about the size of those disappointments. To have so much and still feel grief is an existential torment all its own.

The National is made up of the vocalist Matt Berninger and two sets of brothers: Aaron and Bryce Dessner, and Scott and Bryan Devendorf. Though they all grew up around Cincinnati, the band formed after its members moved to New York. “Sleep Well Beast,” which will be released this week, is the National’s seventh full-length album, and its first since 2013. Over the years, the group has adroitly lampooned its reputation as a collection of sad sacks. Shortly before the National’s previous record, “Trouble Will Find Me,” came out, the band played the song “Sorrow” (“Sorrow found me when I was young / Sorrow waited, sorrow won”) continuously for six hours at MoMA P.S. 1, in Queens. That project, “A Lot of Sorrow,” was conceived by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, but it required the National to acknowledge some of the comedy inherent in its gloom. Berninger knows when and how to make a weird joke: “I’m walking around like I was the one who found dead John Cheever,” he sings on “Carin at the Liquor Store,” a new song about being destroyed by love.

Lyrically, “Sleep Well Beast,” like much of the National’s discography, dwells on the impossibility of human relations: how hard it is for two people to want the same thing, in the same way, for longer than just a moment. Maybe, Berninger ventures, defeat in this arena is not a failure of character or of generosity but simply the cost of a meaningful entanglement. He seems to believe that our needs are too mercurial, and our compromises too imperfect; every relationship, romantic or otherwise, inevitably spirals toward the same stalemate. “It’s nobody’s fault, no guilty party,” he sings. “We just got nothing, nothing left to say.”

This gives the record an elegiac feel. Berninger has always written cleverly and frankly about nostalgia (“I am secretly in love with / everyone I grew up with,” he offered on “Demons,” from “Trouble Will Find Me”), but now he seems to be reckoning with how inert and immovable feelings of regret and longing are. Something significant has been lost—but what can he do about it? Mostly, he tries to forget, to wait it out, to blur the edges a little. “Until everything is less insane, I’m mixing weed with wine,” he sings on “Walk It Back.”

Berninger’s wife, Carin Besser (a former editor at this magazine and, presumably, the subject of “Carin at the Liquor Store”), is credited, with Berninger, as a co-writer of the album’s “lyrics and melodies,” an arrangement that, admittedly, complicates some of its lovelorn narratives. It would be simple to presume that Berninger was merely lamenting the state of his marriage—successful rock singers aren’t known for making excellent husbands. It’s knottier to think of these songs as stories that the couple is telling together. Through this filter, “Sleep Well Beast” becomes a stranger and more dynamic document, about the commitments we make to each other, and about how we choose to yield to them. “The day I die, the day I die, where will we be?” Berninger wonders. The use of “we” implies a kind of infallible devotion. It’s romantic, in a backward way: the idea that two people could become so hopelessly entwined that, even when the relationship falters or fails, they remain spiritually coupled. “Carin at the Liquor Store” is the record’s saddest song, and its most haunting. “I wasn’t a catch, I wasn’t a keeper,” Berninger admits. He is full of shame, indignation, and self-loathing—all the cold comfort of the recently rejected. “So blame it on me, I really don’t care.” What this sounds like is: I am sorry you don’t love me enough.

If that seems devastating, well, it is. The band isn’t peddling catharsis this time around, or offering solutions—“Let’s just get high enough to see our problems,” from “Day I Die,” is possibly the worst advice I’ve ever heard. It’s simply suggesting a new way to metabolize heartache.

In the almost sixteen years since the National made its début, Aaron Dessner has become a sought-after producer, working with acts like Frightened Rabbit, Sharon Van Etten, and Local Natives. With his brother, he has also curated and produced several notable compilations, including “Day of the Dead,” for which they corralled more than seventy artists to cover songs by the Grateful Dead. He recently built a studio, Long Pond, near his home, in upstate New York. The bulk of “Sleep Well Beast” was recorded there, with some additional sessions in Los Angeles, Paris, and Berlin. Dessner’s production is meticulous, and allows for expanses in which a note or an idea can properly linger. Synthesizers, horns, and strings drift in and out of these songs in perfect arcs.

“Sleep Well Beast” features more electronic beats than the band’s previous albums, but Bryan Devendorf remains a visionary and inventive drummer. The National has always leaned heavily on its rhythm section to give its songs a frantic edge. Devendorf is at his best when he has room to make idiosyncratic choices, which often turn out to be transformative. On “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness,” a song about alienation, his drumming reminds me of cockroaches scattering after the kitchen lights are flicked on—it makes a nervous song feel fully paranoid.

Fans of the National have had plenty of time to acclimate to Berninger’s voice, a heady, lumbering baritone, yet it’s worth reiterating its singularity. Listening to it, I often think of a deep-sea diver, weights slung low on his hips, being tugged toward the ocean floor. Berninger uses his instrument in artful and elegant ways. In the past, he has periodically broken into ragged screams, as on “Abel” and “Mr. November,” from “Alligator” (2005). On “Sleep Well Beast,” he explores his mumble: “I better cut this off, don’t wanna fuck it up,” he gabbles on “Walk It Back.” When he briefly moves into a higher register, often on a song’s chorus, it can feel ecstatic. On “Turtleneck,” a political song that recalls the baggy alt-rock of the nineties—somewhere between the Violent Femmes and the Pixies—he sounds breathless and wobbly, until he finally lets go and yelps.

Berninger writes frequently of a suffocating claustrophobia, particularly when he’s been cornered at a party. Across records, his most consistent yearning is for solitude, or time in some private place with one other person. He’s often plotting his own jailbreak—delivery from the crowd—or cajoling someone to sneak off with him. “Meet me in the stairwell in a second, for a glass of gin / Nobody else will be there then,” he sings on “Nobody Else Will Be There,” the spare, tense song that opens “Sleep Well Beast.” It’s a misanthropic impulse that’s inherently at odds with his line of work, which gives it a funny kind of urgency. “I’d rather walk all the way home right now than to spend one more second in this place,” he sings on the wintry bridge of “Day I Die.”

In July, the National played two intimate shows at Basilica, a former glue factory near the Hudson River in upstate New York, close to Dessner’s studio. With the band now based in several cities, this was as close to a home-town gig as it could get. The musicians set up on a circular stage in the middle of the room. Strangers were clutching one another.

While performing, Berninger is an inscrutable and arresting presence. He’s not still, exactly, but, even without the dark suit jacket he often wears, there’s something staid and almost professorial about the way he looms onstage. This makes sense—he’s briefly embodying the heavy, reverberating sadness of these songs. The work is hard and serious. For anyone who has ever found herself mired in this sort of situation—apathy mixed with deep hunger—Berninger’s echoing of it can feel like a public service. ♦