Local Natives deliver a nostalgic ode to brotherhood, plus new music from PJ Harvey and Hannah Diamond

Thanks for reading the Toronto Star’s Weekend Music Digest, a roundup of new music, concert listings and more.

We took a little break, so this week’s roundup includes new music from the last few weeks, including tracks from Local Natives, PJ Harvey, Joanna Sternberg and Hannah Diamond.

Click here to listen along to the Spotify playlist.

Album of the Week

Local Natives: Time Will Wait for No One

In 2013, Local Natives released “Hummingbird,” an emotionally resonant sophomore album that cemented the group’s place in the pantheon of Serious Indie Bands™, alongside other studious critical darlings like The National, Grizzly Bear and Fleet Foxes. Over the following decade, that pantheon began to crumble as seriousness teetered into self-indulgence, and fans began looking for more diverse voices and sounds with which to season their indie rock.

But on Local Natives’ fifth studio album, “Time Will Wait for No One,” the So-Cal quintet seem uninterested in reinvention, instead reviving the rich harmonies, post-punk rhythms and buoyant hooks that made them a festival favourite in the early 2010s. The album, their first in four years, feels less like a relic and more like slipping on a beloved but forgotten hoodie when visiting your hometown: it fits just right and reminds you that the old days weren’t so bad.

During the pandemic, the band was forced into an extended hiatus. Between dark periods of isolation and identity crisis, some of the members got married; others became fathers.

“We’ve been intertwined for so long — I’ve known some of the guys since I was 13,” Ryan Hahn, a vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, said over the phone. “(The pandemic) was the longest we’d ever been apart from each other. Making the record felt less about the music and more about us as friends and as brothers.”

A sense of brotherhood permeates the album — especially in the vocal interplay of Hahn, Kelcey Ayer and Taylor Rice, who grew up listening to the harmonies of Crosby, Stills and Nash — from the lush folk-rock of “Just Before the Morning,” to the more lachrymose offerings like “Ava” and “Paradise.”

“Time will wait for no one / But I will wait for you” they sing on the album’s title track, delivered in the band’s signature three-part harmony over a softly strummed acoustic guitar.

“In the cosmic swirl of everything, there’s so little that you have control over,” said Hahn. “That line was almost like a mantra for us: we’re going to choose to stay connected and be together.”

“This feels like a new version of our band,” he adds. “There’s a newfound gratitude and appreciation to be able to make music with each other and have these deep friendships.”

Star Tracks: More of the best new (and newish) music

PJ Harvey: ‘Lwonesome Tonight’

“Lwonesome Tonight” — the sleeper highlight from PJ Harvey’s 10th studio album, “I Inside the Old Year Dying” — goes down like an exotic spirit, an initially bitter taste giving way to a slightly sickly warmth that slowly spreads through the body. “Hark the greening of the earth / Curl-ed ferns yet to uncurl,” the alt-rock luminary coos in an icy falsetto, her voice flitting over sparse guitar and padded percussion. Harvey’s lyrics, despite being dense and highly allusive (Genius notes several references to Elvis Presley and Jesus Christ), hold the listener tightly as the melody swings in gratifyingly unexpected directions.“‘Love Me Tender’ are his words / As I’ve loved you, so you must,” she concludes, finding lovely common ground between the two kings.

Joanna Sternberg: ‘People Are Toys to You’

On its surface, Joanna Sternberg’s new album “I’ve Got Me” might appear slightly innocuous: another New York singer-songwriter writing self-effacing folk tunes. But Sternberg’s scrappy sophomore project is packed with punchy hooks, biting humour and intimate storytelling, making it one of the most satisfying and addictive albums of the year. Take the album’s title track, on which Sternberg channels Elliott Smith for a painfully funny meditation on insecurity: “Why is it so hard to bе kind and gentle to myself?” they ask.“Take the box of self-deprecation / Lock it and put it on the shelf.” But the album’s stickiest earworm is “People Are Toys to You,” a boot-stomping breakup song that might land in the centre of a Venn diagram of Tom Petty, Big Thief and early Joanna Newsom. “You said you stayed ’cause you felt bad for me / How sweet of you to call me charity,” they sing over crunchy electric guitar, and you can almost feel the sting.

Hannah Diamond: Affirmations

Last month, PC Music — a London-based record label and art collective founded by producer A.G. Cook — announced that 2023 would be the year’s final year of new releases. The news was bittersweet for fans of the collective, which pioneered a form of exaggerated pop music that eventually set the foundation for the polarizing microgenre known as hyperpop. Ten years after PC Music’s formation, hyperpop as a counter-cultural genre has largely run its course, and its definining sounds and styles — pitch-shifted vocals, bubblegums synths saws, frenetic percussion — have slowly been contorted and absorbed into mainstream pop (to mixed results). Moreover, several of the producers associated with PC Music have gone on to work with major conceptural pop stars (A.G. Cook frequently works with Charli XCX, and produced a song on Beyoncé’s “Renaissance,” while Danny Harle was a key writer and producer on the new Caroline Polachek album).

Anyways, on Thursday, PC Music released a new single from one of its signature artists, Hannah Diamond, whose unique “post-ringtone” aesthetic explores, with some irony, the pink-hued sincerity of teenagehood. Produced by David Gamson, “Affirmations” is pure, undiluted hyperpop bliss.“I will always be enough / I mean a lot to all my friends and I will never give up,” Diamond declares with unflinching earnesty, as shimmering synths twist and twirl around a massive four-on-the-four beat. And yet, hidden beneath the bubblegum production there’s a twinge of nostalgia; or perhaps a note of melancholy that attends the fleeting joy of youth.

More new releases

Miscellanea from around the music world

“If there were a producer who fully belonged to this moment, he would need to be something like a non-brand brand, paradoxically recognizable for his ability to produce stylishly forgettable content. In the preferred euphemistic terms of the ruling class, he would be less an innovator than a curator: a bricoleur of cultural tidbits, endowed with impeccable taste in kitsch and the classics alike. His persona would be humble or sincere or exuberant in a muted sort of way, like someone shouting as he recedes down a hallway. He would be impossibly versatile: a wearer of all hats, capable of working in seemingly any style. He would be wildly successful by the standards of commerce — views, streams, dollars — and by those of professional tastemaking — glowing reviews from critics, fawning profiles by journalists. Ubiquitous and ignorable, critically acclaimed and terminally unhip, memeable but unshakably serious, such a figure would fully express the essence of a seemingly essenceless moment.”

Newly announced concerts

Toronto Concert Calendar: A selection of upcoming shows across the city

Friday, July 14

The American singer-songwriter and pianist will swing through Toronto on her “Keys To The Summer Tour,” with support from Afrobeats singer Libianca.

Saturday, July 15

The Nigerian Afropop giant returns to the Bud Stage this weekend as part of his “Timeless Tour.”

Wednesday, July 19

The American singer and rapper (?) plays back-to-back shows at the Bud Stage on Wednesday and Thursday, with support from indie rock band Beach Fossils.

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