Local Natives

At the end of September, five LA-based musicians – all coiffured facial hair, and checked shirts – stepped on stage at the small Academy 2 venue in Dublin to play songs from an album that would not be released for at least another month. Even though the band had only been in existence for a year and a half, a sizeable crowd was present to check out the name everyone was dropping at last March's South By South West (SXSW), the highly influential Texas festival which generally dictates which indie bands are the key ones to watch out for. Local Natives played a great set that night, expressing their shock at the size of the turn-out given that they've come from playing to handfuls of people in LA to packed venues in Europe, and grinning when the crowd cheered as song titles were announced.

A month later, they played six gigs in three days at CMJ, New York's equivalent of SXSW. Speaking from New York, bassist and singer Andy Hamm reflected on the building buzz around the West Coast group.

"I guess it's like anything in any industry – once the ball gets rolling, it gets rolling," he said. "I feel like, especially these last few months, everything started moving forward. It was only about a year and a half ago that we were essentially a band. So it's been really cool."

Cool it certainly is. Media coverage of Local Natives has swiftly increased, bloggers have hopped on board plugging them as the next big thing, and musos jokingly refer to them as Local Vampire Arcade Foxes such is their merging similarity to indie favourites Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire and Fleet Foxes – comparisons that will certainly do them no harm.

Right now, the band live together in a house in LA's Silver Lake neighbourhood – the Williamsburg to Hollywood's Manhattan. Hamm describes their progression from just another band to the next medium thing: "We moved to LA, we started to send the music out to a few people, then started playing shows. At first we were playing to nobody, then in a couple of months we did a residency at Silver Lake Lounge. Those turned out to be packed. Then we did a residency at a bigger venue, and that turned out to be really packed. It was awesome that LA was really welcoming to us, and then after SXSW we started getting our UK and overseas contacts. The response has been really, really warm. Everyone from Europe and the UK has been really receptive to what we're doing, especially for a new band."

Local Natives' magic touch centres around their exquisite vocal abilities and perfect harmonies. The raggedness that typified indie in the past has been cast aside in recent years for a purer sound, with Bon Iver, Bat For Lashes, Grizzly Bear, Fleet Foxes and Florence + The Machine exemplifying this focus on more 'professional' sounding vocals in a band. Apart from that, Local Natives' interesting use of percussion, sunny melodies and tightness as a live unit are winning them fans internationally.

Hamm explains that such a sound comes from an overwhelmingly collaborative approach encompassing all members: "In our band, it's five people with five different writing styles, and everybody contributes," he stated firmly. "It's an arduous process a lot of the time because there are so many cooks in the kitchen and everybody wanting to put their two cents in. But I can say without a doubt that not a single song on the album would sound like it is without every single one of the members in the band. It's definitely not one singer/songwriter and the rest of us play the parts that someone else wrote."

That album is Gorilla Manor, already released in Ireland and the UK on Infectious Records (although Local Natives are still without a label stateside). Its 12 tracks, recorded on the cheap in LA, shine as bright as the Californian sun, all brilliant melodies, energetic thumping, and great riffs, perfected on 'Airplanes' and 'Sun Hands'.

As a new band, Hamm is also realistic about the type of living Local Natives are going to make from music, in spite of their growing popularity.

"All of us were part of the generation that got the music for free. There's none of us in the band who ever knew what it was like to sell records, or were friends with bands that did sell records," he said, adding that copyright is a rather defunct idea in this new musical climate.

"We've felt it's natural, the fact that our music is out there for free and all of it will be out there for free very, very soon, if not already. It's something that we expected and we embrace, because that's how I find out about bands, especially new bands. It's like, I'd rather have a fan find out about us and be able to look up a bunch of music for free, listen to it, and get super into it than find out about us, go on the internet and then see they could only get one song and the rest they have to pay for."

This is a view that many established musicians oppose, but Local Natives adopt the attitude that there's no point fighting the endless wave of 'illegal' downloaders, instead choosing to embrace them and hope the payback comes in the end.

"For a new band, it's really important to let people listen and make a fan out of them, and then they'll come to a show and we can go from there," said Hamm. "I want the fan that's gonna be a real fan. I know that when I get into a band, it's not only that I love one song by the band, I really like the album, and I like the imagery that goes with it, and I like to read stories about what the songs are about and how they were written, and I like to see the live show. It's more about you're falling in love with the whole band and not just the fact that you found one free mp3 but past that you can't get your hands on anything."

Perhaps their record labels won't be so keen on that attitude, but as Hamm puts it, "We're learning as we go, that's a safe assumption."