The National return to announce first live show since 2024

The National have announced plans for their first live show since 2024 – check out the details below. The band will be performing a special one-off show as part of AB100 festival in Sans Sebastian. Dubbed “The National And Friends”, the event will be staged at the Kursaal Donostia on October 18 and will include performances from the band alongside the likes Kevin Morby, Ben Howard, Jon Hopkins, Mina Tindle, Ragnar Kjartansson, Arcade Fire‘s Richard Reed Perry, Anaïs Mitchell and many more. Tickets go on sale on August 3 at 11.30am Central European Time (10.30 BST) and can be purchased here. The band last dropped two albums in 2023 – ‘The First Two Pages Of Frankenstein‘ and ‘Laugh Track‘. Speaking in 2024, they told NME that they were in a “very creative space” and in the “gardening phase” of writing new material. Since then Berninger has released a new solo album ‘Get Sunk‘. He revealed at the time that a lot of the lyrics for his second solo album were written on baseballs. “For me, writing on the baseballs is making me a better writer just by physically slowing the writing process down,” he told NME in 2025. “My brain sits on a word just a hair longer when I have to write it on ...