With all that’s happening I feel like January was a long time ago. A month rendered in our minds as we looked forward to a new decade ignoring how our lives would change in the following months. And it was around that time I published my lists of favorite music from the past decade, and if you read them (if you didn’t here they are) you’ll know that High Violet was a protagonist. The album landed solidly at the middle of my top ten, amid a group of very different albums. The LP’s centerpiece, ‘Bloodbuzz Ohio’ is my favorite song of the 2010s.

The record itself is a textured and evocative collection of indie rock tracks that showcased a new found ambition for The National at the beginning of the decade, after a solid string of four LPs the last of which was considered the band’s breakthrough, 2007’s Boxer. High Violet, which turned 10 years old yesterday, was received with critical acclaim, a reception that was in line with the expectations surrounding it, taking in account that after its predecessor, the Ohio band had transformed from one of rock’s hopeful buzzmakers to indie darlings and festival mainstays.

I’ve said this before and it’s still probably true, but after the peak The National reached with Boxer and subsequently High Violet, they became increasingly reliable. They reached a point that made the 3 other albums they released in the 2010s be considered, inherently theirs, albeit being well-regarded. High Violet, in the other hand was both well received and made a serious case for a band in transformation.

The intricacy with which it was made, prompted me, and probably many others, to distill its sound and themes track by track. And although I’ve loved the album since I first heard it, my understanding and knowledge of it was closely related to how well I embraced each song. Opener ‘Terrible Love’, with the Dessner brothers dense guitars and propulsive coda, gives a glimpse of what High Violet packed. The record never abandons this song theatrical leanings, a sound the band executed brilliantly, combining it deftly with vocalist Matt Berninger’s brooding baritone and his dealings with making sense of adulthood and the very concept of belonging.

‘Sorrow’ has a mournful tone, ‘Little Faith’ a thrilling urgency and ‘Anyone’s Ghost’, which features Sufjan Stevens, is a steady ballad about a distancing relationship. As I said, the album’s main highlight is ‘Bloodbuzz Ohio’, a relentless, rhythm driven rock track, that deals with the foreboding feeling of returning to the place where you came from and feeling like a stranger. This song, along ‘Terrible Love’ and closer ‘Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks’ were the only songs from the album played when I saw The National live past October. The fact they’re the first, the middle and the last songs and the three are essential to the record, speaks also of the cohesiveness which the band portrays in it.

In the back half you find the mid-tempo and nuanced ballad ‘Lemonworld’, the rhythm-changing ‘Conversation 16’ and the quasi-anthem ‘England’, all prime examples of how the band’s aim was one far more complex than before, and the result was actually quite admirable. But, in the end, what gives significance to High Violet 10 years on, is that as a growing statement and defining moment in The National’s career, it’s still a piece that embodies change and the tough shortcomings that may bear.

There’s: “I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees/I’ll never marry but Ohio don’t remember me”, and “Now I’m stuck in New York and the rain’s coming down/I don’t feel like I’ll go anywhere”, and also “Now we’ll leave the Silver City for all the silver girls gave us black dreams”. All these examples are bound to places or related to a particular movement between them. Berninger and most of the band lived in New York for most of the 2000s and that was changing. He actually moved to Los Angeles, a city he names in ‘England’. The Dessner and Devendorf brothers also moved from New York, and that not only influenced the album’s themes but also propulsed its sense of misplace.

As I started my adulthood, The National’s music became more and more relevant, because I was increasingly identified with the idea that all the shortcomings of actually turning into a grown-up are quite relentless and disorienting. High Violet has had more impact, and still resounds to this day, because it represented a shift of the point of view. A sudden change of pace, an adding of elements, an ensemble of new ideas that gently shaked the core of a band that many considered already defined. At some points I consider it a climax, but the fact that since then they’ve made solid, although little, steps in different directions would automatically discard that statement as precocious.

High Violet is the first album I heard from The National, and altough it’s hard to name it my favorite, it is arguably their most influential, both in their own careers and their immediate surroundings. Will people describe it as an inflection point in the future? Who knows? Whatever the case, its sheer musicality, broad vision and excellent dramatic approach, while still being characteristically relatable, certainly help to love it.