Kevin Bronson on May 14th, 2016

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Local Natives’ first single in three years is titled “Past Lives,” but their concert Friday night — during which the Los Angeles quintet played a total of eight new songs — was all about moving forward.

It’s been more than three years since the band released its sophomore album “Hummingbird,” and at the sold-out Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, the natives were just as restless to hear fresh material as the Natives were to play them. When Taylor Rice announced early, “We’re gonna play you a ton of new songs,” the roar equaled the reception given to familiar tunes such as “Wide Eyes,” “Ceilings” and “Airplanes.”

What fans witnessed was a batch of new songs that, on first blush, are less elusive than “Hummingbird’s” and less constrained to the palpitating folk-rock for which Local Natives are known. You wanted the Natives to rock out? Gotcha. You wondered what those tenors would be like in a soul song? Check. You were curious about what they’d sound like doing synth-pop? That too. None of these forays, however, seemed to sacrifice what the band does best: two- and three-part harmonies in elliptical melodies over tricky rhythms.

“Our new record was formed by being in a city that’s the best place to be right now,” Rice told the crowd. “It seems like everybody is moving to L.A., or wants to. It’s because here you feel like you can do anything you want to.”

No new song embodied that spirit more than the slow-building folk-rocker “Fountain of Youth.” “We can do whatever we want / we can say whatever we mean,” they sang, climbing toward a big finish.

Yet for sheer muscle, that one paled in comparison to “6’10,” as aggressive a rocker as Local Natives have ever made. In fact, it’s an immediately likable banger. Both of those came late in Friday’s set as the band — Rice along with Kelcey Ayer, Ryan Hahn, Matt Frazier and Nik Ewing — sailed through 75 minutes that ended in two songs from their 2010 debut, “Who Knows Who Cares” and “Sun Hands.”

At the other end of the spectrum, though, was “Villainy,” which Rice introduced as something that’s “super-new for us.” Indeed, the guitar-less song oozed along propelled by vocals, synths and electronic rhythms. Equally memorable was “Coins,” a minimalist soul ballad backed by “ooh-oohs” and punctuated at the finish by handclaps.

“Thanks for hanging in there,” Ayer said after that one, before Local Natives launched into the familiar “Airplanes.”

Two of the new songs played earlier were closer to Local Natives’ milieu — “Masters,” a buoyant rocker with tasty guitar licks, and “Dark Days,” a more brooding mid-tempo song that Ayer explained was inspired by “nostalgia from growing up in Southern California where it’s always sunny … except I hated the sun.”

There are no specifics yet when Local Natives’ third album will be released (late summer or fall?), or what it will be called. But on Friday, it sounded like a growth spurt.

Setlist: Past Lives, Psycho Lovers, Wide Eyes, Breakers, Dark Days, Villainy, Masters, Ceilings, Heavy Feet, Coins, Airplanes, 6’10, Fountain of Youth, Who Knows Who Cares. Encore: Sun Hands.