Type It Up: the tour runoff, tidied to five songs
Matt Berninger's third solo release is a five-track EP from the Get Sunk tour: three originals and two covers. The originals are the reason to play it.
BY JOLT Staff · SEP 18 2026 · 2 min readType It Up has five songs: three by Matt Berninger, plus "Blue Monday" and "Who Loves the Sun", which close it and belong to New Order and the Velvet Underground. His three were written and reworked on the Get Sunk tour, played to rooms night after night, then put out as they stood.
Berninger is the frontman and lyricist of The National. On his own he has moved slowly: El Vy with Brent Knopf in 2015, Serpentine Prison in 2020, Get Sunk in 2025. Type It Up is the third solo release, and the first that behaves like a document.
“These songs came out of the momentum and energy of the Get Sunk tour”
"These songs came out of the momentum and energy of the Get Sunk tour," he says. The method was live: lyrics and forms changed night after night, with feedback arriving from audiences and social media comments as the shows went on. The title track shows it. It began as "Black Letter Font" until listeners misheard the line, so he swapped the chorus. "I'm more of a black linen suit guy," he says. Out via Book/Concord Records, with vinyl on December 4 carrying one extra, "Martini Me Fatso (Acoustic Live in Australia)."
Sequenced like a setlist: "Martini Me Fatso" first, already out as a single, then the title track, then "Ask for Water", the one flagged as new and the longest here at five minutes and change, with a video from Chris Sgroi. The covers take the last two slots.
The voice holds it together. Berninger has sung in the same low baritone for twenty years, and that is what welds the EP: the borrowed songs land as his. It is why the covers work, and why they are not the reason to play it.
It is for anyone who was in the room during the Get Sunk run, or anyone who wants what a National record leaves behind without the length of one. It sits beside Serpentine Prison, not in front of it. If you have never heard him, this is not the door.
The arithmetic is the problem. Two covers on a five-track EP is nearly half the record, and the format is too small to hold them. "Blue Monday" arrived first as an Amazon Music Original, a commission, and it sits in the tracklist like one. "Who Loves the Sun" fits better, with Rosanne Cash on it, but it ends the EP at two and a half minutes, on someone else's song.
Three songs of his own, finished in public, are the case for the EP, and the two covers cap it. A tour's residue, filed: modest, and real. The next one should be an album.
