In March, the National played two shows at the Bell House, a 350-person venue hidden on just the sort of desolate street in Brooklyn near the Gowanus Canal that might be featured in one of their songs. The shows, announced on short notice, gave the Cincinnati-bred, Brooklyn-based five piece a chance to try out songs from their forthcoming record, High Violet. In the audience the first night were a lot of journalists, cool dads, seemingly disenfranchised creative types, and Michael Stipe, the lead singer of R.E.M.

YouTube videos of the National’s new material surfaced in the days following the Bell House shows. The grainy clips washed out lead singer Matt Berninger’s baritone and murdered the vivid guitar playing of twin brothers Aaron and Bryce Dessner. Drummer Bryan Devendorf and his bass-playing brother, Scott, were all but erased by the video-recording capabilities of cell phones. And you can forget trying to do the horns and strings justice. But if blog comments were any evidence, these new songs, despite the poor fidelity, were already taking root in fans’ imaginations. The general consensus was that the release of High Violet can’t come soon enough.

With 2007’s Boxer, the National established themselves as the bards of the upwardly mobile creative class, while simultaneously expressing their own anxiety of joining its ranks. On “Mistaken for Strangers,” Berninger sings of being “showered and blue blazered,” painfully aware of the danger that he’ll be “mistaken for strangers by your own friends.” It’s honest and haunting and ripe with gallows humor. Berninger’s lyrics may not always imply that storefronts are closing and arc-sodium street lamps are shutting off, but the music does. The mood is in the melodies.

Lead singer Matt Berninger.

If rock history is any guide, the National could be poised to have an OK Computer moment. In 1995, with two commercially and critically successful records under their belts, Radiohead supported R.E.M. for part of their world tour. And, as rock lore has it, Michael Stipe described the British quintet as “so good they scare me.” Thirteen years later, the National went on tour with R.E.M. on the heels of Boxer, and Stipe has not been shy with his praise, telling The New York Times Magazine that their music is “instantaneous. It touches you.”

Much as Radiohead did between The Bends and OK Computer, the National have taken every element in their sonic palette—from the layers of orchestration to the propulsive drumming, to guitars tuned in ways previously unimagined—and stretched each one’s scope and reach. The National’s songs lurk in vacant warehouses, restlessly reverberating between the walls until they gather the energy to crash through casement windows and break free. They get you with the slow burn. Or, as Bryce puts it, “where you might otherwise put a guitar solo, we put 10 cellos.” Perhaps the most compelling use of orchestration on High Violet is the bass clarinet, which adds a haunting sheen that resonates under Berninger’s towering timbre.