Name Local Natives
(Intro questions completed by Nik Ewing)
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Best known for Our six albums, in stores now.
Current city: Los Angeles
Really want to be in Stockholm for Midsommar.
Excited about Our sixth album, But I’ll Wait For You (released in April), a companion piece to our fifth album Time Will Wait For No One. We’re playing record stores and also screenings of our short film But I’ll Wait For You. A companion piece to our companion piece, if you will.
My current music collection has a lot of Adrianne Lenker
And a little bit of Kendrick diss tracks.
Preferred format I’ve been a sucker for CDs and honestly regularly get roasted for it by Ryan. I like getting into my car and not having to scroll for five minutes to pick the perfect soundtrack!
Ryan Hahn
Push the Sky Away, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
I have a vivid memory of the first time listening to this album during our insane run of touring in 2013. We were in a sprinter van driving to Zurich after playing a show in Milan the night before. I was sat up in front with our sound guy Mark, exhausted and a little hungover. It was a cloudy, gray morning but the views out the window were incredible as we wound our way up and through the mountains. I remember driving along a beautiful, freezing lake as the album started and just absorbing every song, every lyric. It felt like the perfect soundtrack to that drive but also to that emotional time and place in my life. I’ve come back to this album countless times since then and I always come away feeling inspired when I do. It’s probably a bit like saying In Rainbows is your favorite Radiohead album, but I just love how this album encapsulates so much about what I love about Nick’s work with the Bad Seeds. It’s emotional, dark, funny, raw, epic, a bit of everything. “Jubilee Street” is one of my all time favorite songs. For me, the lyrics to the closing title track perfectly speak to what the creative process feels like. Also, go watch 20,000 Days on Earth.
Taylor Rice
In Colour, Jamie xx
When an album is so incredible that it opens up an entirely new genre of music to you, it stays forever. In Colour is one such album for [me]. I’d really never gotten into electronic music, which seemed lifeless and created only for parties and festival drug-laden benders to my uneducated and unappreciating ears. But each track on this record is so surprising, so musical, so alive, it completely took me over. The melodies, choral parts, and grooves that emerge like mountains and dissipate like giant waves are gorgeous. Sleeper hit “The Rest is Noise” is my favorite track, with its long beautiful piano solo, euphoric chord structure, and possibly the coolest kick pattern ever written. I love this album and would not want to live without it. Thank you Jamie for opening my mind to electronic music and helping me discover a new genre of amazing music.
Kelcey Ayer
Third, Portishead
I realize this may be sacrilegious, especially if you’re from the U.K., which if you are, I’m sorry (about this take, not about you being from the U.K.), but for me, this is by far my favorite Portishead record. The minimalism, spookiness, garbled-tape and just overall fucked-up vibe floored me when I first heard it. It’s become my benchmark for finding the perfect balance between lo-fi and hi-fi. There’s also a peak vulnerability that Beth [Gibbons] achieves here in her vocals that is so beautiful in this bleak, harsh sonic landscape, like a lost heroine in a dark forest. I’m rooting for her.
Nik Ewing
Blonde, Frank Ocean
From the very first listen, this album instantly sounded like an old friend, a comforting companion in a troubling year. Maybe that’s partially because the album is quite literally littered with old friends, like an Elliott Smith lyric or a repurposed Beatles melody or André 3000 reminding you why he rightfully ruled the world in 2002. But Frank ingeniously collaged all this together along with string arrangements from Johnny Greenwood and Jon Brion, chords by James Blake, Beyoncé singing a harmony for like two lines, all into a masterpiece. There are so many moments in this album, I can’t even figure out what is happening musically (and I’m a very professional musician)! Melodies hardly ever repeat. Contradicting thoughts are sung over each other as if we hear his racing thoughts aloud. Beautiful vulnerability takes turns as if a joyful mushroom trip just went dark, forcing us to soberly look at the same memory through another lens. The deep dives into vulnerability and re-examining youth can either cure the broken heart or break the sad reality that “there will be mountains you won’t move.”
Zuma, Neil Young & Crazy Horse
The first time I heard “Cortez the Killer,” driving north through California, I frantically googled the song. Like, “I know this song, where do I know it from? Was it in a movie?” After much research, I determined I had never heard the song before in my life. It’s just one of those songs that sounds like it always existed and yet you, and you alone, have this personal relationship with it.
Local Natives will be heading out on tour on September 21. Visit their site for details.
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