Khruangbin have today (January 16) shared their blissful new single, ‘A Love International’ and have announced details of their first album in four years, ‘A La Sala’. Check out the new single below.
The album, which translates from Spanish as ‘To The Room’, will arrive on April 5 on Dead Oceans in partnership with Night Time and you can pre-order the album, which has seven varied album covers available to purchase, here.
A statement about the album explains that “the building blocks…for ‘A La Sala’s’ 12 songs were jigsaw pieces found in Khruangbin’s creative past” that were made up of “parts of the band not lost, but not yet tapped into.”
It continued: “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’.”
Check out the new song here and the album track list below:
‘A La Sala’ Tracklist
1. ‘Fifteen Fifty-Three’
2. ‘May Ninth’
3. ‘Ada Jean’
4. ‘Farolim de Felgueiras’
5. ‘Pon Pón’
6. ‘Todavía Viva’
7. ‘Juegos y Nubes’
8. ‘Hold Me Up (Thank You)’
9. ‘Caja de la Sala’
10. ‘Three From Two’
11. ‘A Love International’
The American trio worked with singer-songwriter Leon Bridges on a second collaborative EP, entitled ‘Texas Moon’, back in 2022 and the new album marks their first original music as a band since 2020, aside from various remixes.
Reviewing their last album ‘Mordechai’, NME awarded it a full five stars and wrote: “No wonder Khruangbin, who make psychedelic music that travels between eras and continents, have become low-key stars in the past decade. Guitarist Mark Speer and drummer Donald “DJ” Johnson played in a gospel band together at St. John’s United Methodist Church in downtown Houston – the same church that Beyoncé, Solange and the rest of the Knowles family frequent.
“…‘Mordechai’ is Khruangbin at their most grounded and energetic, the tempo slightly raised with vocals infiltrating nearly every track — all three members sing throughout. The band artfully showcase their musical knowledge to create a project which marks a clear distinction for the largely instrumental band. With ‘Mordechai’, Khruangbin have at once expanded their horizons while rooting their latest project in a sound they’ve made their own.”
The band also graced NME‘s cover back in 2020. Speaking about their perceived rapid rise to fame at the time, the band’s Laura Lee said: “You have no idea how long it’s going to last when you’re starting out. The whole of last year was a real ‘Holy shit!’ moment. We set out to be a worldwide band – and we got it.”
While Donald Johnson added: “People on the outside look at our trajectory and go, ‘Oh, it happened so fast…But, y’know, not really. We’ve been at this for nearly 10 years, I have no idea how we ended up where we did…We can only take this band one day at a time.”
