[The National are] a band playing exhausted, self-pitying songs about experiences in interior rooms, about the ongoing resignations and failures of courage between people who are pretty much fine, actually. The exact feeling of a National song is the part of that episode of Mad Men where Don Draper reads one (1) Frank O’Hara poem. Despite being a bunch of dudes with guitars who now play gigantic sold-out venues, they exist on roughly the same frequency as the novels of Updike or Cheever (the second of whom is referenced by name on 2017’s Sleep Well Beast), quietly concerned with the glossy surfaces atop our alienation from ourselves. Their songs chronicle wholly survivable catastrophes; they land like a long talk in a car parked in the driveway of a suburban home late at night. Their whole onstage person is that of a man eternally one drink away from starting every sentence with “my wife”...
You don’t have to have actually, legally ended a marriage to have Big Divorce Energy. I know plenty of people in their first marriages and people who have never been married at all who have serious divorce energy, and I know plenty of people who have in fact been through one or more divorces who have little to no divorce energy. When I first started listening to The National, I assumed their music was a glimpse into their lives; I assumed Berninger must be in the middle of his marriage falling apart. But, as their latest record highlights, this band itself is an invention and their Big Divorce Energy is for show, fiction and not autobiography.
big divorce energy is a particular vibe of exhausted navel-gazing on mundane topics/problems that verges on solipsistic in tone or content. fitzgerald's essay (see below) doesn't really give a concise definition, instead mostly focusing on vibes, but she does quote a friend in the essay who describes the concept as "wine bar problems".