Khruangbin have released their first album in four years–A LA SALA–via Dead Oceans.
A gorgeously airy album, it was made only in the company of the group’s long time engineer Steve Christensen, with minimal overdubs. It is a porthole onto the bounties powering Khruangbin’s vision, a reimagining and refueling for the long haul ahead. A LA SALA scales Khruangbin down to scale up, a creative strategy with the future in mind. The band has shared the video for ‘Hold Me Up (Thank You),’ a song with familial sweetness in its spare lyrics, feeding off the rhythm section’s sturdy funk shuffle, and a chorus on which the guitar evokes both sides of the Atlantic in confident unshowy rhythm.
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 downas off-the-cuff recordings (voice-memos made at sound-checks, on long voyages, as absent minded epiphanies), they began fitting those pieces together in the studio forA LASALA.
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
