Local Natives, Back From the Brink

Local Natives make music for those of us who are still growing up—which is to say, they make music for each other. The band formed in 2005, after Kelcey Ayer, Ryan Hahn and Taylor Rice met at their Orange County high school. Cut to a few years later, and they’re UCLA dropouts working on their debut album alongside drummer Matt Frazier and then-member Andy Hamm. The result? 2009’s Gorilla Manor, a self-funded ode to the gritty, joyous home they shared while recording it. Painted across the record’s swooping instrumentals and erudite, Icarian lyrics is a sense of early-twenties immortality. In 2009, Local Natives felt eternal.

But, as the story often goes with these things, they weren’t. Bandmates changed and grew up, morphing the group in irrevocable ways. The thousand tiny cuts that accompany young adulthood rocked Local Natives’ reality in the sorts of fracturing directions they never would have pictured in that bright, messy house in Southern California. Then, the pandemic hit. Ayer, Hahn, Rice, Frazier and bassist Nik Ewing found themselves farther flung than they had ever been before. After over a decade as a band, they wondered if this enforced isolation might be their death knell.

There’s a spatial dissonance apparent when I first enter the Zoom room where I’ll interview the band. They enter one by one, seemingly unsure of one another’s real-time locations. Their incoming feeds span interstates and oceans—Ewing is in Sweden and Frazier is in Austin, while others remain scattered around California. It’s a reminder of the inexorable obligations which encroach further on the simplicity of their early music-making as they hurtle towards 40.

And yet, there’s a reason Local Natives have remained together through it all. There’s something special about the consciousness of their decision to stick it out. “Crazy things happen that you have zero control over, and the one thing I think that we came back to, that we have within our grasp, is this friendship, these relationships that we have with the people we love,” Hahn explains, grinning into the screen. His background is blurred, and he’s just been ribbed rather mercilessly for it. He sips from an indiscriminate white paper cup which itself blurs into the background at times, a reminder of our separation flitting in and out of my periphery.

The title of Local Natives’ newest album is fitting: Time Will Wait For No One came out of a period of turmoil, in which the band wobbled over the brink of extinction. The product is a record that is expansive and multivalent, a tribute to the group itself and the ties that bind them. The music possesses a distinct intentionality; there’s a devotion woven through and protruding out of it; a funneling of gratitude into the band’s internal mechanics. Its writing began as the pandemic swung into force, creeping forward into its final iteration more slowly than the band has operated before.

“This was the longest we’d been apart since we were, like, 14 years old,” Rice laughs. Indeed, the band was formed almost 20 years ago now, and they’ve spent the last 15 of them writing, touring and working almost entirely as a unit. Each member’s musical evolutions have moved in tandem with their journey into adulthood, and the inability to be together hit them hard. “We had to really redefine how to work together again after such a huge, monumental shift of being apart,” Ayer notes. It took therapy and effort, homespun backyard guitar jams and staccatoed 30-minute work sessions. They tried sending each other voice notes, bouncing stems around on an app Hahn discovered. Rice recalled that a half-hour of online jamming resulted in hours more of troubleshooting and confusion. “A song doesn’t become a Local Natives song until the five of us get together and it can grow within this magical mesh of what it is to have that collaboration. We were a little bit stymied at the level-one demo phase for a long time,” he mentions.

Beyond the expected GarageBand snafus, tectonic personal shifts crept in on members of the band as the pandemic wore on. Throughout 2020 and 2021, they got married and had children. Ayer and his wife suffered a miscarriage and, subsequently, a pregnancy loss, leaving him breaking down during rehearsals. “In the middle of this creative process, it got—it wasn’t, like, dark, but we didn’t know if we were going to continue as a band,” Ewing interjects. “It wasn’t just like we got back in the studio and were like, ‘Alright, cool, we’re friends again.’ It was tough for a while.”

Some of the group wondered whether this might be their last album—a revelation which, Hahn describes, sort of saved them. “There’s something about when you’re faced with the unspeakable things that you never want to talk about, like the band not being here,” he admits. “Once you broach that, and then you start repairing—and even in this interview, we’re talking about things that I think in the past we would have shied away from—there’s a newfound freedom and spirit that I think we all feel, just having more appreciation for being musicians, that we get to make music together.”

It’s a sweet thing to witness: Each member of the band seems legitimately grateful that their little posse still exists—Frazier actually thanks the band for “showing up,” in the broadest sense. It’s the kind of gratitude that, as they realized, you only grasp onto after you see what it might be like to lose it. “It’s so hard to make a record at all with five people,” Rice acknowledges sheepishly. “This is our fifth one, and it took the most energy and the most talking, more real sitting down and parsing through the past, and I feel proud that we could get to the other side. We’ve made more music during this time than we ever have.”

Time Will Wait For No One is more fleshed out than some of Local Natives’ early work, though not devoid of the band’s signature indie-rock flourish. Some of the songs are slower, featuring more isolated instrumental strains and wispier vocals than the group is known for. Some of this shift is due to a democratization of sound—Rice, Hahn and Ayer split vocal duties now—but it’s also a natural maturation of the band’s sound. Most of the songs read contemplative, with even the joyous numbers paying heed to the cliff the group found itself dangling over in the making of the album.

The band wasn’t sure if it all might work out until a show at the famed Greek Theater in 2021. “We had started writing the record, but we were in this amorphous place of swirling and darkness,” Rice recalls. “And this little gap opened up and we got to play at the Greek in LA, you know, our hometown and I realized, like, since we were 14 years old, we had gone the longest without playing a show. That night we still weren’t sure if the band was going to continue. And that was just a wild thing to experience. I’m just proud that we came back and were like, ‘What’s important about this as what we dedicate our lives to?’ It’s really the way we’re able to show up for each other and, I think, make music that feels meaningful to all of us.”

“You’re just kind of going, you know, on a track the way you do in life, and for everybody, the pause [of COVID] made you look and kind of reexamine. And I think, for us, there were a lot of things that we were going through, personally, that didn’t have to do with the band—there was a lot of difficulty in our experience, and there was a drifting apart, where we were just not tied together in the same way,” Rice sighs. “What’s beautiful about the record, and that love that you’re picking up on, is like re-coming to it as a choice, rather than it’s on a track. One thing we went through was releasing a little bit and letting individuals be individual a little bit more, the freedom in that bond that we have together.”

In loosening the reins to the way they’d defined the band, Local Natives found themselves even tighter than before as a group. There was more trust, more honesty and, as a result, a huge surge of prolificity. The record is more intimate and more intricate than their prior works, perhaps because circumstances forced it to be.

Take “Hourglass,” a creeping, hymnal tribute to a love that slips through your fingers. Hahn wrote the song about a personal disconnect with a loved one, but the band grasped onto the tune as a reflection on their own experiences with one another. There’s a tangible desperation to the layered harmonies, a need for the song to speak out in the nebulous darkness where the band had found themselves. Or “Paradise,” a song Ayer wrote about the loss of his unborn children and the California wildfires. He sent it around as a demo, fiddling with it as a solo project. Yet, as the album progressed, the messaging behind the track extended its arms to all the group’s members. Freedom led to that coherence.

The album’s title reflects that, too. I ask what Time Will Wait For No One means to the quintet. “We’re all gonna die,” Hahn grins. It was him, after all, who wrote the matching lyrics and then fought to have them buried deeper in the album, fearing they might arrive “too threatening.” It’s in the album’s intro song, a minute of acoustic, stripped-down harmonizing accompanied by crunching gravel and chirping songbirds. The resolution to the track makes it a bit less menacing: “Time will wait for no one,” the three vocalists intone, “but I will wait for you.”

I ask the band how they feel they’ve changed through all this, and they all clamor over each other in a fraternal, familiar way. “The music, sometimes, felt like the secondary thing; it was getting back together with our vibe and our relationship—and then the music started to reflect that. It got better and better,” Rice smiles, shouting out of the scrum.

Where does the band see themselves now? “In the land of dinosaurs,” Rice jokes. No, but really: It’s no small matter to have been together this long, to have seen each other through so much. “A lot of people would call it quits, and a lot of people would just be like, ‘I’m done, this is too hard,’” he continues. “We’ve talked to each other about how lucky we are to be with likeminded people in a group where we can make music that feels like awe-inspiring stuff to us, stuff that we all love. Finding five people on the planet who can come together and make it, it makes me laugh. Not even surviving, but coming out on the other side and feeling evolved feels like a miracle.”

Time Will Wait For No One is out tomorrow via Loma Vista Recordings. Listen to Local Natives’ Paste studio session from 2019 below.

Miranda Wollen is Paste‘s music intern. She lives in New York and attends school in Connecticut, but you can find her online @mirandakwollen.