Khruangbin

preorder* by 12th april or come by the shop and take a picture in our window and tag us and Khruangbin for the chance to win a limited prize box.

Includes:

an exclusive print of the LP artwork

a copy of the album on "Wetlands" colour LP (not available in the UK)

a totebag.

*no purchase neccessary

A glossy, transcendental, life raft of lobe-tickling sounds from the ambient psych experts - they whisk in just the right amount of funk to recreate that chilled Sunday afternoon laidback festival vibe which they're so synonymous with. Masterful stuff! Khruangbin’s fourth studio album, 'A La Sala' (“To the Room” in Spanish), is an exercise in returning in order to go further, and doing so on your own terms. It continues the mystery and sanctity that is the key to how bassist Laura Lee Ochoa, drummer Donald “DJ” Johnson, Jr. and guitarist Mark “Marko” Speer approach music. If 2020’s 'Mordechai', the last studio LP Khruangbin made without collaborators, was a party record that enhanced the band’s musical reputation far and wide, then 'A La Sala' is the measured morning after. It’s a gorgeously airy record completed only in the company of the group’s longtime engineer Steve Christensen, with minimal overdubs. It’s a window 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 trio’s collective musical DNA, the years spent constructing it in Houston’s local-meets-global cultural stew, ensures the band continues to sound like no one but itself. A cascade of crisp melodies emanates from Marko’s reverb-heavy electric, dancing gently around Laura Lee’s minimalist almost-dub bass triangles, while DJ’s drums serve as the tightened-up pocket and unwavering dance-floor on which all this movement takes place. Yet there’s a freshness to 'A La Sala'’s instrumental interactivity, less concerned with getting further out than going deeper in, a profound desire to celebrate the world’s external wonders.

Where prior albums strived towards music’s polyglot edges, such inquiries now sound like beloved intimacies. Here, Khruangbin’s sonic touch-points — whether spaghetti-western film scores (on “Fifteen Fifty-Three”), West African discos (on “Pon Pón”), G-funk fantasias (“Todavía Viva”), living room dancing moments (the first single, “A Love International”), or even ambient found-sounds (on “Farolim de Felgueiras and throughout the album”) — are ingrained characteristics. This is who they are! Unique and huge (and growing), ambitious and driven.