New York five-piece the National have been refining a language of exquisite melancholy since they formed in 1999; new album Boxer finds them attaining a rare fluency. For years they have been a cult concern, but tonight a packed Astoria suggests the wider world is finally ready to listen.

The band's forte is pensive, eloquent songs shot through with existential woe, as if life is all too much to bear. Brainy is just one of many songs whose clipped, staccato drums and skeletal rhythms recall the mournful majesty of Joy Division.

Gawky singer Matt Berninger is an awkward presence between songs ("Uh, I'm not too good at talking"), but comes alive amid the fluid intensity of the music. His songs are a series of reproachful admonishments to himself. His rich velvet croon can recall Lloyd Cole, but his solipsism has far more gravitas: the skittering Mistaken for Strangers is so edgy and thin-skinned that you feel you can see the song's nerve endings pulsing beneath its slick surface.

The gently chiming Fake Empire is magnificent, as wry and raw as Leonard Cohen, while Squalor Victoria aches with the doomed romanticism of the Blue Nile. Berninger seems taken aback at the warmth of his reception tonight, but the National's days as US rock's best-kept secret look to be well behind them.