This week in random hipster nonsense: The National are going to play their track ‘Sorrow’, from the album High Violet, for – wait for it – six hours straight. It’s part of a performance piece by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, who has given it an extremely appropriate title of ‘A Lot Of Sorrow’.

I wish I was artistic enough to understand any of this but I can’t. So I’ll try to make some sense of it based on information from MOMA’s website, which says that The National’s music “repeatedly conjure notions of romantic suffering and contemporary Weltschmerz”. Weltschmerz, according to my handy dictionary, is a “mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state”.

In trying to explain the relevance of all of this, the site explains, “By stretching a single pop song into a day-long tour de force the artist continues his explorations into the potential of repetitive performance to produce sculptural presence within sound.”

So to break this all down – The National are going to play a sad song for six hours. It sounds incredibly boring and depressing. People will still show up because it’s weird and it’s The National. Whatever.

Tickets and more information are available here. In case you were wondering, you’ll be able to watch the band play for a few minutes a time, before being shuffled to a courtyard where the sound is still audible – just in case you want to sit and have a picnic while listening to a terribly depressing song.

Here’s the song: