Laugh Track is the tenth studio album from American indie rock band the National. The surprise album was released on September 18, 2023, having been announced only days prior. The album's material was mostly written and recorded alongside the band's earlier 2023 album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, with several songs being re-recorded at producer Tucker Martine's studio after honing their arrangements while on tour in 2023. Preceded by the singles, "Weird Goodbyes", "Alphabet City" and "Space Invader", the album features guest vocal appearances from Justin Vernon, Phoebe Bridgers and Rosanne Cash. Laugh Track has received positive reviews from critics.

After taking a break during the COVID-19 pandemic, the band reunited and began working on a ninth studio album. Initially going through a difficult period of writer's block and depression, lyricist Matt Berninger and the band eventually produced enough material to fill two albums. Their first release from the sessions was the single, "Weird Goodbyes", which was released on August 22, 2022, and featured guest vocals from Bon Iver.

They released their ninth studio album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, on April 28, 2023. The album did not contain "Weird Goodbyes", with bandmate Aaron Dessner hinting at a different "future home" for the song. The song was originally planned to be a stand-alone single, with Dessner noting "It was its own thing. But it also felt related to what we were doing. That was part of the logic for making another record—let's give "Weird Goodbyes" its own home."

Letting go of notions of how to make songs and allowing for some loose, unstructured approaches to come into it. Also, some songs literally came from just improvising on stage during soundcheck. Maybe it's having come through a really hard time and nearly not surviving as a band. We came back together and we felt healthy.

During the National's tour in support of First Two Pages of Frankenstein, the band debuted new material and continued to workshop the remaining unreleased songs from the recording sessions, with the newly-recorded material favoring live drums over pre-programmed percussion. A press release accompanying the release of Laugh Track wrote: "Revelling in the license to radically upend its creative process, The National honed most of this material in live performances on tour this year, and captured those invigorated versions in impromptu sessions at producer Tucker Martine's Portland studio, Flora Recording & Playback." The album's closing track "Smoke Detector" was recorded in June 2023, during a soundcheck in Vancouver, when the band felt inspired to continue jamming in a rare move for them. The band consciously wanted to highlight Bryan Devendorf's drumming on the album, after having a more "compartmentalized role" on First Two Pages of Frankenstein: "This time we had the desire to make something that was more alive so that Bryan's playing would drive more."

Prior to the album's release, the singles "Alphabet City" and "Space Invader" were released on streaming services in August 2023 with artwork matching the single artwork for "Weird Goodbyes". In September, at the band's Homecoming 2023 festival in Cincinnati, the band publicly announced a second album called Laugh Track would be coming out digitally the same weekend. At the performance where the album was announced, 1,000 early vinyl LP copies of the album were sold, signed by each band member, with Berninger saying the full vinyl release would be sometime in November.

Editors at AnyDecentMusic? characterized Laugh Track as a 7.6 out of 10, based on sixteen reviews. According to the review aggregator Metacritic, Laugh Track received "generally favorable reviews" based on a weighted average score of 78 out of 100 from 14 critic scores.

Editors at AllMusic rated this album 3.5 out of 5 stars, with critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine writing that the music is at "a precisely modulated temperature, bringing the songs to warmth slowly and steadily". Spencer Kornhaber of The Atlantic called this work "hopeful music about everything getting worse", with "bleak" lyrics paired with "music [that] still has the light-seeking quality of Frankenstein". Editors at BrooklynVegan shortlisted this as a notable release of the week and critic Andrew Sacher wrote that this music has "the same passion and attention to detail that they've had for two decades straight". At Clash Music, Sahar Ghadirian gave this release a 9 out of 10, writing that it speaks "to the duality of human emotion" with a playful title accompanied by emotional lyrics and highlights several tracks for their atmospherics. Mary Siroky of Consequence called this album "a fine but forgettable companion" to their previous release, continuing that the music is "at its best when things get full and rich" and it "serves as a gentle reminder that there's a difference between tenderness and boredom; long, meditative music is fine and good, but often more interesting when there's a destination in mind". In Exclaim!, Alex Hudson rated Laugh Track an 8 out of 10, calling it stronger than its predecessor: "where the earlier album sounded meek, the follow-up finds the National easily sinking into what they do best". In Evening Standard, David Smyth wrote that this "has a greater number of diversions from the set sound" for the band and "it sounds like they're starting to come back to life"; he scored it 4 out of 5 stars.