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.”