the national
[Photo by Josh Goleman]

Hear the stunning team-up between the National and Phoebe Bridgers, "Your Mind Is Not Your Friend"

The National and Phoebe Bridgers have collaborated before — as Bridgers once joined the indie-rock faves on stage in 2019 to play “Where Is Her Head” and later released the song “Walking on a String” with Matt Berninger for Netflix’s Between Two Ferns: The Movie. But today they’ve released their first-ever proper album single.

Today, the National dropped “Your Mind Is Not Your Friend,” a song off their upcoming album First Two Pages of Frankenstein (out April 28th via 4AD). It’s a somber, piano-led song in which Berninger sings of the ways anxiety and negativity can trick us mentally, with the boygenius members’ vocals echoing his.

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The song also directly relates to the album title, which helped Berninger in a period of writer’s block. “When I feel stuck, I’ll often grab a book off the shelf just to get some words in my head, and the first two pages of Frankenstein ended up triggering ‘Your Mind Is Not Your Friend,’” Berninger said in a press release. “The book starts off with the narrator on a voyage near the Arctic Circle, and that image of being adrift helped me to write about feeling disconnected and lost and lacking in purpose. Once I started confronting that strange, blurry panic of not having ideas, everything began to crack open a bit.”

The music video for the song also arrived today — which was directed by none other than Bridgers’ brother Jackson Bridgers. Watch the video below.