One of the many awful effects of the coronavirus pandemic is how it has confirmed, for many of us, the nagging and perennial fear that things will never be as good as they once were. The virus still circulates, but the past few years contained a hard before and after, demarcated by lost lives and years and possibilities. We’re older and sadder, and there’s no going back. How do we move forward?

No work of art has hit me with the weight of that question like the new album from the National has. The indie-rock band finds itself, 22 years after its debut album, at the height of its influence. Taylor Swift counts its members—especially the multi-instrumentalist Aaron Dessner—as collaborators and inspirations. Their renown is so great that they were able to attract their own heroes, Patti Smith and Pavement, to play the band’s festival in their hometown of Cincinnati last weekend. Laugh Track, the National’s second album of 2023, was crafted while the band toured sold-out arenas. Yet it is also heavy—beautifully heavy—with concerns of decline.

This concern is not new, just newly urgent. The singer Matt Berninger, now 52, has growled his sardonic self-pity for decades: “I used to be carried in the arms of cheerleaders,” went one line, the lament of a fading jock, on the 2005 album Alligator. The band’s sound—simmering orchestral rock, part R.E.M. and part Philip Glass—has always captured the tussle between survival and decay. But in 2021, the band got stuck. Berninger faced depression and writer’s block; he “worried the National had entered in its endgame,” as the writer Colin Groundwater reported in a GQ profile.

The band pushed through and recorded an album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, released this past April. The music twinkled with rare hopefulness, and some of the lyrics had therapeutic dimensions (the song title “Your Mind Is Not Your Friend,” for instance). The upbeat lead single, “Tropic Morning News,” was a particular high point. Yet the album was not widely received as an inspiring trophy of a band conquering a middle-age slump. Reviews were so-so. Critics and fans heard redundancy, mawkishness, and complacency.

The surprise release Laugh Track is that album’s more interesting companion, started during the Frankenstein sessions and finished on the road. The oscillating chords and drifting time signature of the first track, “Alphabet City,” announce an experimental approach, and two strong, rambunctious cuts have run times of about seven minutes. The album also contains cleverly constructed anthems and skewed takes on traditionalist country—but crucially, the National’s songs are once again packing an emotional wallop.

[Read: Taylor Swift and the sad dads]

Berninger’s narrator sings of being baffled by his own malaise: “Friendships are melting / Nothing is helping,” goes a refrain from the gentle “Coat on a Hook.” In “Weird Goodbyes,” an elegant synth-pop tune featuring Bon Iver, Berninger wonders, “I don’t know why I don’t try harder.” The title track is particularly eloquent in distilling the theme. “Losing my momentum, losing my mind,” sings Berninger, before Phoebe Bridgers adds, in her voice of vaporous beauty, a list of mortal inevitabilities to dread: “I think our feet are gonna slip / I think our hands are gonna shake.”

These words sound bleak, but the music itself still has the light-seeking quality of Frankenstein. Most of the songs can be heard as dialogues between a distressed person and a loved one consoling them with grace and empathy. Singing in dreamy reverb on “Tour Manager,” Berninger thanks a woman who makes excuses for him not showing up to things. “Alphabet City” seems to come from the the point of view of the helper: “I’ll still be here when you come back from space / I will listen for you at the door.”

Sufferer-and-savior narratives can be trite, and Berninger would do well to shake up his storybook from time to time. But his lyrics do capture the wrenching nature of human companionship: moving through time together, collectively mourning what’s gone and anticipating what’s to come. On the title track, Bridgers and Berninger fake-laugh through despair, musing, “Maybe we’ve always been like this.” “Space Invader” envisions a past in which Berninger never met the person he’s with. The song rumbles with a blend of grief and gratitude, inspired by thoughts of a reality emptier than his own.

As for the specter of the National’s decline as a band—well, I must admit that I prefer their older stuff. The band’s best music is fierce and mysterious, scrawling weird poetry on the inside of the listener’s skull; their 2023 output, by contrast, can be a bit soft and predictable. But the band is still challenging itself to achieve very-goodness, and Laugh Track casts a potent mood, giving shape to ineffable realities of growth and aging. The album’s final song is a jittery jam session in which Berninger recites praise for a smoke detector, a device that flashes steadily until its batteries zap out. The lives we lead are, thankfully, not as straightforward as that.