I've honestly always thought it was the song structure? & feel like I never see anyone talk about it, which seems odd. But think about songs like, just off the top of my head, Sea of Love, Terrible Love, I Need my Girl, Humiliation, Karen—it's like they're made up of multiple alternating or successive choruses. Most songs do a verse chorus structure with a bridge. But The National do SO MANY of their songs with just a few repeated mantric type stanzas that either go back & forth OR, not infrequently, just get abandoned part way through a song & replaced with a new chorus. They almost hardly ever seem to even have a proper verse. They'll often toss in a bridge but when the difference between verse & chorus collapses into everything being functionally a refrain it's hard to think of it in verse-chorus-bridge terms anymore.

You can find it on just about every album & it seems sometimes like it's most of their songs, with traditional verse chorus structure being the exception rather than the rule. It's truly one of my favorite aspects & I really think that's the most distinctive thing about them.