Time Will Wait For No One Local Natives

• 1Time Will Wait For No One01:14
• 2Just Before The Morning03:34
• 3Empty Mansions03:25
• 4Desert Snow03:35
• 5Paper Lanterns03:51
• 6Featherweight03:34
• 7Hourglass03:58
• 8Ava03:57
• 9NYE03:10
• 10Paradise03:54
• Total Runtime34:12

Info for Time Will Wait For No One

Local Natives will release their fifth studio album, Time Will Wait For No One. The collection of songs showcase the band’s seminal SoCal harmonies and was recorded across historic LA recording studios with Grammy award winning producer John Congelton (Angel Olsen, Death Cab For Cutie, St. Vincent, Sharon Van Etten).

Of the album the band said, “This record was made during a time of metamorphosis for us. Former selves melting away as some of us became fathers, endured periods of isolation, loss, and identity crisis. The highs and lows we were feeling at the same time were so extreme. There was a moment halfway through making the album, we played one of the most emotional concerts of our lives. A sold out show at the Greek Theater in LA, our first performance in almost two years, but we didn’t know how we could move forward. As individuals and as a band, we were on the verge of a collapse. Time flows on uncontrollably and change is relentless, and the people you love are the only constants. Out of that reckoning we dissolved everything down to start again, and had the most prolific period of songwriting in our history. This is the first chapter, Time Will Wait For No One.”

The announcement comes with the release of their newest single “NYE,” a frenetic, frolicking post-punk inspired tune, which premiered this morning on 6Music. Local Natives have an ongoing tradition where the rest of them make up the wedding band when another member gets married. So at Ryan Hahn’s wedding last year, the others assembled to play some of his favorite songs of all time, one being “Someday” by The Strokes. Ryan says of the experience, “I was so floored watching the guys play this from the audience, something I’d never seen before, that I thought we had to do a fast and wild song, & NYE was born.” The catchy soundtrack to a favorite memory.

Based in Los Angeles, the group progressed their sound over the course of four full-length albums, Gorilla Manor [2009], Hummingbird [2013], Sunlit Youth [2016] and Violet Street [2019]. In the span of one year the band performed twice on Jimmy Kimmel Live! For the first performance they were accompanied by Sharon Van Etten playing “Lemon feat. Sharon Van Etten” off the Sour Lemon EP. They closed out 2021 with a performance of Roxy Music’s “More Than This” from Music From The Pen Gala 1983, an EP coinciding with their appearance in the Apple Original Series The Shrink Next Door starring Paul Rudd and Will Ferrell. Local Natives have received praise from Pitchfork, Consequence of Sound, The Guardian and many more. In between countless sold out shows and festival appearances – including a standout Coachella 2017 set – they’ve graced the stages of Austin City Limits, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, The Late Show With David Letterman, The Late Late Show With James Corden, Jimmy Kimmel Live! and more.

Local Natives

Local Natives
Let’s think about our musical heroes for a second. How few of our favourite artists rose from a burst of brilliant light and then rode that one, simple wavelength across an entire career. Those who have truly built a lasting lot, one with arcs, evolution, and focus—the icons who hold up the mirror to nature and push themselves to grow and change and persevere, and who challenge us, the listeners and fans, to follow them on their glorious, circuitous paths—those are the heroes who will truly live forever.

In 2010, Local Natives galvanised a musical scene in Southern California, crafting a sound that they loved, and that others flocked to in turn, with the breakout success of their debut album, Gorilla Manor. The five-piece from Los Angeles featuring Taylor Rice, Kelcey Ayer, Ryan Hahn, Nik Ewing, and Matt Frazier have since created a series of different cathartic chapters informed by their constantly changing surroundings.

The band’s second album, 2013’s brooding and lovely Hummingbird, was born out of a period of darkness, a time spanning loss, grief and change. It was, as Rice calls it, an “existential nightmare” and a difficult writing process, but is remembered fondly by its authors as a beautiful and honest representation of who and where the band was at the time. After a multi-year tour that required the group to relive the dark introspection night after night within the explosive enthusiasm of their stage show, Local Natives were ready to transition into their next phase and to begin writing a new record with an entirely fresh perspective.

As the band began to grow, so too grew its lens, and suddenly the “indie rock” lens cap did not seem to fit any longer. These 30-year-old Los Angelenos had seen the world and heard its sounds, and knew, deep down, that there was more in them. And, as in the style and paths of those arcs of our heroes, when Local Natives filtered this whole new layer of influences through their spectrum, the result is an everywhere-you-turn showcase of vision and virtuosity and their grandest statement yet: their third album, Sunlit Youth.

“Coming out of Hummingbird, I think we took our time,” Rice says. “Part of that was to hit a reset, but also the whole process of this new album was very different. We made sure we were connecting to the joyfulness of making music and what inspired us, and we let that lead us. These songs have this outward effusiveness to them. We threw out our band rulebook and tried to push our dynamics and to think differently.”

The first step in this leap of faith was their songwriting process. As opposed to culling song ideas from jamming together as a group as in the past, the band’s core trio of songwriters Rice, Ayer, and Hahn each produced songs on their own more frequently than ever before, rendering each writer prolific and vastly increasing the number of

songs brought to the group space. “That just made us so much more productive,” Rice says. “It was more fun and more free. We wrote fifty songs for this album. I think the record shows that it was chosen from a much larger batch of songs.”

“It took us a second to get used to the idea that no matter how much you slam your head against the wall, a song isn’t going to be great unless everything truly comes together,” Ayer says. “We just focused on the good ideas and knew what to chase. I think getting better at writing songs means knowing what to grab and what to throw away. It’s better to see potential. This record is definitely a testament for us that if you write fifty songs, you’re gonna get ten or twelve that you really love.”

The kick-start album-opener “Villainy” signifies the band’s unbridled new energy and huge ambitions. As Rice sings “I want to start again / sunset’s new babbling man,” electronic notes sputter and swirl, rising and setting as drums pound and keys light the path. It heralds more of a focus in that energy—something the band has had in spades since the beginning—than a change in direction, and the way it reaches beyond the rafters and straight into the sun points the way for the tracks to follow.

As Hahn says, “We’ve gotten older and gotten better at our instruments. There’s a confidence in that, and a confidence to be selfish. You start thinking, ‘What do I want to hear?’ Forget about what we’ve done and what people expect. This is a song that I would want to hear. Selfishly, within the band, if we like this, it doesn’t matter if anyone else does. ‘Villainy’ was born out of listening to sounds that I would have never listened to for Gorilla Manor. We just wanted all the new stuff to have a different energy, and to challenge ourselves to do something different each time.”

Across the album, the band does just that, delving into dancier, poppy moments on “Past Lives” and “Masters,” Fleetwood Mac-inspired dark pop on “Dark Days”, blue-eyed-soul stomp on “Coins,” and prospective anthems on “Fountain of Youth” and “Call Me On.” And while this is new ground for Local Natives to some degree, the sound never loses those qualities that made us fall in love with them in the first place, an accomplishment the band endears to simply following their desire to please themselves.

What has always been there for Local Natives is their meticulous crafting of musical elements while constantly pushing and pulling melody, harmony, and rhythmic components from within their construct and out into the cosmos. Their method lends to a dynamic beyond cerebral execution and into pure, unbridled emotional and energetic territory. As the hedges grow higher in our minds, the band has tapped into that which got the seeds planted in the first place, and the result is an empowering concept of eternal life embodying what Sunlit Youth is all about.

“The record is optimistic and does suggest this feeling that we—as individuals, as society—have the power to take life wherever we want. It’s exuberant and joyful but I think we have a self-awareness in this world now that you can’t have when you’re twenty years old and making your first record. We’re realising that there’s a cyclical nature to it all and there’s always a new perspective. I think it’s this optimistic vision of how the world works, and this album is about facing those realities. A concept like ‘Fountain of Youth’ isn’t an individual, selfish desire to live forever, it’s more the kind of regenerative way that the world is made over and over again. We can do our small part, even if you don’t know how it’s going to affect the change. That is what optimism and changing the

world into what you want is. It’s a metaphor. We could connect each of these songs to that feeling of empowerment. ‘Sunlit Youth’ evokes that feeling. It feels like a nice wrapping-up of this trilogy of who we are: these Southern California kids who grew up feeling like the world was this endless possibility. We make music for a living. It’s the most insane thing that any of us would have imagined.”

This album contains no booklet.