Photo by Chris Sgroi
Matt Berninger has announced that his debut solo album, Serpentine Prison, will be released on Oct. 2 via Book Records, a new imprint formed by The National frontman and the album’s producer Booker T. Jones, in conjunction with Concord Records.
In celebration of the release, Berninger has also premiered the album’s title track, the video for which can be seen below.
“The song ‘Serpentine Prison’ was written in December 2018 about a week after recording The National’s I Am Easy to Find,” Berninger explained about the new track in a statement. “For a long time I had been writing songs for movies and musicals and other projects where I needed to get inside someone else’s head and convey another person’s feelings. I liked doing that but I was ready to dig back into my own garbage and this was the first thing that came out.”
Berninger continued, “The title is from a twisting sewer pipe that drains into the ocean near LAX. There’s a cage on the pipe to keep people from climbing out to sea. I worked on the song with Sean O’Brien and Harrison Whitford and recorded it about six months later with Booker T. Jones producing. It feels like an epilogue so I named the record after it and put it last.”
The album features a number of notable contributions from artists such as Matt Barrick, Andrew Bird, Gail Ann Dorsey and Berninger’s The National bandmate Scott Devendorf among others.
Check out the video for “Serpentine Prison” below and click here to purchase the title track in advance of the album’s Oct. 2 release.