Touching Bass: Local Natives

This weekend Beacons festival makes its way towards some stunning Yorkshire dales. If you didn't know already, You Need To Hear This have got a stage propped up there with fistfuls of pioneering new bands including Local Natives, who recently gifted the interwebz with their second album Hummingbird. They also handed us the video for "You & I" last month which we premiered on YNTHT. If you're shooting off to Beacons this weekend, we'll catch you there. If not, listen to this mini mixtape that swings from King Krule to Bonobo to Little Dragon and imagine yourself basking in obscene amounts of alcohol and musical debauchery.

Noisey: Hey guys! How does it feel to be out in France and in the sun?

Ryan: This is awesome. First summer out in France was pretty rainy and cold. Our time out here was really fun though and we all ended up getting to hang out around the town.

That's cool. So on your latest album you worked with The National and also worked in Brooklyn. What was the transition like between your first and second albums?

Taylor: For Gorilla Manor everything was just plug into the amplifier and record. It was very direct and straightforward. With Hummingbird we made our own little studio in Los Angeles and we were there for about eight months before we actually made the album. That time was very exploratory for us with our actual recording. We were experimenting with electronic sounds and synths that we hadn’t done before so it was quite a different process.

Arcade Fire just let James Murphy record their album.

Kelcey: Yeah they got that idea from us.

Of course they did. Is there any danger of letting someone so renowned into your space? Your first album was so private and intimate.

K: The four of us having been writing music together for about ten years now so letting someone in was very frightening, for sure. We met Aaron on tour and he had us open for The National. We developed a friendship first and we felt that he was someone we could really confide in so any fear that we had kinda disappeared the first day we worked together. He was so easy to work with because he comes from a collaborative past so he made us feel really comfortable.

In the drums especially, you can hear the influence. Do you ever listen back and go “oh, that’s what he did”?

Matt: It’s funny because about 90% of the album was recorded before he started working with us.

K: It was actually funny because our material at the time was a lot darker and he became involved and he was trying to make us sunnier and happier. And we weren’t.

Being happy is great. Moving on, we're knee deep in the festival season and Beacons is coming up this weekend. Are you looking forward to playing it?

R: Yeah man, it’s gonna be awesome. We’re stoked for it.

Sweet. On a different tangent, do you guys see yourselves as an indie band?

K: I don’t know.

R: Is that your answer, I don’t know?

K: I think the whole indie spectrum has evolved to include so many genres and sub-genres. I’m not even sure. I think we’ve just been saying that we’re a rock band lately.

T: To me it means we came from an era that’s very different in terms of doing everything yourself. We still do an outrageous amount of things that you might not even think about it. We still do artwork and there’s obvious things like set lists. It is intense, but I’ve really found that that’s the real ethos of so many indie bands. The days of being a rock star are long gone. Maybe that’s for sports players or something. All the biggest bands that we have met are the hardest working bands. We all share that ethos where we don’t expect anything to come from anywhere except what we’ve put out.

Cool. So you don’t consider yourself as hipsters?

K: Err, what do you want to hear?

T: What came first, the moustache or the hipster?

The hipster. Then the moustache could grow on him. Thanks guys.