LOCAL NATIVES

There are bands that write songs in minutes, and pen records in a matter of weeks, maybe even days. Los Angeles’ Local Natives isn’t one of them. “We went home to LA and found this little abandoned bungalow thing—this one-bedroom house that we lived in as a band for three years,” explains drummer Matt Frazier of the origins of the group’s sophomore album, Hummingbird, which was released at the end of January. “We spent eight or nine months living and working together, just writing, writing, writing until we got to the point where we needed to look for producers—some songs took months and months.” The producer the band chose—the National’s Aaron Dessner, a friend and former touring mate—invited the quartet to move into his family’s home in Brooklyn, and thus began several more months of working and recording together. “We lived in an old Victorian house with Aaron and his family,” recalls Frazier. “And we worked through the highs and lows of the past couple years [on the album].”

The resulting record carries the weight of this involved recording process, and the hardships that preceded it. The slow-building, delicately cathartic “Colombia” is about the death of singer-keyboardist Kelcey Ayer’s mother. “Breakers,” the first single off the album, feels triumphant and hopeful at first, with a swell of drums, but the lyrics—lines about watching the color drain from your face and counting breaths—give the song a sense of resignation. “We saw some pretty heavy times—we lost our bassist and Kelcey’s mother,” says Frazier. “And I think this album speaks to that.”

The band is currently playing dates in Europe. It’s the beginning of a massive tour, spanning through late 2013 and taking the guys through from Paris to Melbourne and back again, with stops at South by Southwest and Coachella in between. With the release of Hummingbird, the tour is also a sort of pitch to global audiences for Local Natives as a West Coast alternative to the outfits they opened for in the past (the aforementioned the National, Arcade Fire). It’s a comparison critics made when Local Natives released their début Gorilla Manor in 2010, but with the new album—a darker, subtler, denser offering—the claim is starting to feel real.

Hummingbird is out now from French Kiss. Photography by Bryan Sheffield.

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