Musical polymaths Khruangbin return today with the announcement of A LA SALA or “To the Room” in Spanish — the band’s fourth studio album and first LP in four years out April 5th on Dead Oceans in partnership with Night Time Stories Ltd. Also out today is lead single “A Love International” illustrating the reflective, celebratory nature of A LA SALA with its wistful vocal flutterings underneath a propelling guitar and bass duet. After a decade spent cultivating an elusive, yet extraordinary musical path, “A Love International” arrives as both a nostalgic and poised step forward for Khruangbin – a vista for a band posing subtle questions about the surreal nature of art’s representation and one’s own reality. Watch the video for “A Love International” directed by Scott Dungate and listen here following the track’s debut on Apple Music’s New Music Daily.
As their own live show grows its steadfast following, with Khruangbin unveiled on the Bonnaroo and Boston Calling 2024 lineups last week, the band has in turn established themselves as a ubiquitous cultural force, earning co-signs from musicians across genres and generations including Questlove, Flea, Tina Weymouth, and David Byrne, and earning countless syncs in popular television, (A Murder at the End of the World, Ramy, Barry, Outerbanks), movies (The Holdovers, Palm Springs) and major advertisements (Corona, Propel).
From the get-go, Khruangbin’s journey has been emphatically its own: a sound and visual representation with few precedents, ignoring pop expectations, relying only on internal inspirations, and a multitude of visions. It’s a mindset of penetrating the self, connecting to the surrounding world, modeling your own life experiences. The building blocks then for A LA SALA’s 12 songs were jigsaw pieces found in Khruangbin’s creative past, parts of the band not lost, but not yet tapped into. Having stockpiled ideas originally set down as off-the-cuff recordings (voice-memos made at sound-checks, on long voyages, as absentminded epiphanies), they began fitting those pieces together in the studio for A LA SALA.
Some results fold directly into A LA SALA’s down-home feel. “Three From Two” and “May Ninth” are plaintive mid-tempo numbers, with guitar melodies that reside somewhere between Bakersfield and by-the-riverside, cues that, for all its borderless inclusivity, another core Khruangbin value is being steeped in American roots. And in the landscape that music comes from. Like all albums prior to Mordechai, Marko made sure environmental sounds — natural and man-made — appeared as textures. (At times philosophically: the group recorded while cricket chirps played in their headphones, presumably for terroir.) It’s how A LA SALA achieves such interconnected set-and-setting-ness.
Other results are more metaphorical, especially in Khruangbin’s flirtation with ambient spaces. The dramatically beatless “Farolim de Felgueiras” and “Caja de la Sala” both feature only Marko’s unmistakable guitar dueting with Laura Lee’s Moog, lightly layered with sounds of shoes on stone steps, and cicadas in an open field. The closing “Les Petits Gris” more fully reduces and fleshes out the ambiance, with a piano and a simple single-note bass pattern, Marko’s plaintive spare guitar echoing the melody of a ballerina-turning music box. It feels an apt way of ending — as a passing of this particular moment, preparation for the next one, soon-come.
There are seven different covers that will adorn A LA SALA’s various vinyl editions available for pre-order which offer a throughline from the music into Khruangbin’s current frame. Designed by the band using Marko’s multitude of travelog photos, and inspired by the surrealism of Belgian artist René Magritte, there are windows from the band’s living room onto a set of daydreams, scenes of impossible skies, external glances illuminating what is going on inside. These directly coincide with David Black’s images of DJ,Laura Lee and Marko which accompany A LA SALA, and see the band and a window, being both the observer and the observed. A LA SALA is all about looking out and looking back, in order to better look ahead.
Over the last two years Khruangbin has remained unwavering in their musical vision, selling out shows at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall, Los Angeles’ Greek Theatre and London’s Alexandra Palace. They’ve released five live LPs showcasing their stage prowess – featuring storied guests such as Toro y Moi, Men I Trust and Nubya Garcia – collaborated with Malian guitarist Vieux Farka Touré honoring Vieux’s late father, Ali Farka Touré, with the album Ali highlighted everywhere from The New York Times and NPR (“labyrinthine fusion of dub, blues and Malian grooves,”), to GQ who says “there’s a placelessness to the band Khruangbin that, counterintuitively, gives them their gravity.” That same year the band released their second collaborative EP with Leon Bridges, the sultry, chart-topping Texas Moon, which arrived to widespread acclaim from The New York Times, NPR, Uproxx, Vulture, FADER while pushing the boundaries of psychedelic R&B.
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