Local Natives – ‘Time Will Wait For No One’ review: a solid embrace of passing time
Nobody likes growing up. It’s something that we all have to do, but there’s a certain malaise that inevitably comes with waving goodbye to youth. Rock music has historically been a young man’s game – ageing gracefully isn’t always a guarantee, or even a desired path, for most professional musicians. But as the days of reckless drug use and limited lifespans in music are becoming more and more rare, a growing demographic is coming to the fore: middle-aged indie-rockers. That’s where Local Natives find themselves right now.
After more than a decade together as a band, the California indie pop quintet are past their 20s with families and responsibilities to focus on. The idea that you can’t bet father time might be true, but there are a ton of bands from the original indie rock boom that are still kicking. The question is, how do you keep finding the fire? For Local Natives, the answer is to lean into all of the beauties, anxieties, and uncertainties of not being a kid anymore.
The band’s fifth studio album, Time Will Wait For No One, is a full embrace of getting older. Tracks like ‘Desert Snow’, with its imagery of falling through cracks, and ‘Hourglass’, with its titular motif of time slipping away, make that connection obvious. Maturity looks good on a band like Local Natives, whose rich harmonic take on modern indie rock never really had any of the recklessness or untamed energy of a naive and feral group of kids.
Instead, Local Natives always seemed like they were searching for the answer. As capital-A “Adults” now, the group are leaning into their strengths as thoughtful truth seekers. That doesn’t mean that they’re fully safe from a bit of trend-chasing. ‘Featherweight’ sounds almost exactly like a slowed-down version of Glass Animals’ ‘Heat Waves’, but with its meditations on faith, trust, and durability, it comes out the other side without completely feeling redundant.
If nothing else, Local Natives know precisely what they’re doing at this point. It’s nothing revolutionary, but it’s damn solid work with memorable hooks and lyrics that avoid falling into cliche or cringe. When “Copycats and tortured artists / All looking for the starry night / And how many missed it” are put in the crosshairs on ‘Paper Lanterns’, a very deliberate message takes hold. Local Natives are too old, too established, and too successful to change based on trends or time passing them by.
That does mean that Time Will Wait For No One is decidedly lacking in surprises. It’s a strong companion piece to 2019’s spacey and relaxed Violet Street, not deviating too far from the same path that the band has forged across the last decade or so. But there is something weirdly riveting about hearing them look at the future with a warm embrace rather than fighting against it.
The most uptempo and frenetic that Local Natives get on Time Will Wait For No One is on the album’s penultimate track, ‘NYE’. Strangely enough, it’s one of the only times on the record that the band don’t seem okay with time passing them by. “You made it out alive / But so what / I never noticed I was in the moment / I wish that I could stay” works as a brief but necessary counterbalance on an album that otherwise embraces the unstoppable march of time. Even for those people who have accepted where they are in life with grace, there’s still room for a bit of doubt and regret, especially when the clocks never stop moving forward.
The itchy trip-hop beat that backs up the otherwise ballad-like ending track ‘Paradise’ ends the album on an uncertain note – “paradise on fire / I don’t know what to think / Is the sun rising / I can’t get up that early / I’m holding on to my dream.” Whether you interpret that as five grown men refusing to abandon the young man’s game of rock music or finding a middle ground between their responsibilities as fathers/adults and still going out on tour every couple of months, ‘Paradise’ leaves the album open-ended.
As an encapsulation of ageing, Time Will Wait For No One is equal parts warm acceptance and uncertainty. But with their signature style of indie pop behind them, Local Natives step bravely into the strange new world of adulthood with confidence. Growing up might not be terribly cool, but there is a way for rock music to look good while doing it. Local Natives don’t have all of the answers, but they’re certainly going in the right direction.
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