Shortly after the release of his first solo album, 2020’s Serpentine Prison, Matt Berninger fell into a depression so deep that he could neither write nor sing. Having spent two decades detailing smoke-thick melancholy as the lead singer of The National, the sudden inability to articulate this all-consuming darkness was debilitating. On The National’s twin 2023 albums, Laugh Track and First Two Pages of Frankenstein, he confronted that year in paralysis head-on. Now, on his second solo album, Get Sunk, he seems determined to leave that bleak period behind him for good. But his more positive outlook comes at the expense of the rich detail and self-analysis that brings Berninger’s work with The National to life.

From the outset, Berninger gestures at epiphanies without exploring them. Opener “Inland Ocean” builds around a tremolo guitar with little flourishes of wind and strings as Berninger sings about something imprecise: “Lost cause, I have no emotions.” A pared-down choir returns to that line as though it’s a mantra, but the lyric is so vague that it comes off less as profundity and more as a stray thought. The same is true on the following track, “No Love,” where Berninger sketches the feeling of a location but never returns to shade in the empty spaces. “This place has a sinking feeling/The energy’s so strange,” he sings, “It doesn’t have anything to do with anything/The vibes aren’t right.” Major chords and uncluttered mixes undercut any uneasiness those lines might have conjured.

These songs lack Berninger’s gift for rendering the mundane dramatic. Take “Once Upon a Poolside” from First Two Pages of Frankenstein, the first song he wrote after that debilitating bout of writer’s block. There, too, he’s disoriented—“What was the worried thing you said to me?” he asks in the stark chorus—but he fights through to find some poetry in his senses: the smell of sweet perfume, planes sinking into sidewalks, a panic attack in super slow-motion. All that Berninger evokes at the top of Get Sunk is the slow-motion.

There are moments of intrigue on Get Sunk, not least the two duets. “Breaking Into Acting” features Meg Duffy of Hand Habits, while Julia Laws, a.k.a. Ronboy, adds minimal melodies on “Silver Jeep.” Their voices are a welcome reminder of a world outside Berninger’s mind, and his lyrics open up as a result. In the intriguing little scraps of detail on the latter song—“I gotta get a message to you without signals/AC motor puts me right to sleep/I dream of dreaming and grind my teeth”—Berninger finally attempts to express the inexpressible, rather than simply acknowledging it and letting it go. His sonorous, croaking baritone feels weightier when tied to Laws’ airy harmonies.