Khruangbin – A LA SALA LP Dead Oceans

“‘A La Sala,’ I used to scream it around my house when I was a little girl, to get everybody in the living room; to get my family together. That’s kind of what recording the new album felt like. Emotionally there was a desire to get back to square-one between the three of us, to where we came from–in sonics and in feeling. Let’s get back there.” – Laura Lee Ochoa

The title makes it clear. A La Sala (“To the Room” in Spanish), the fourth studio album by Khruangbin, is an exercise in returning in order to go further, and do so on your own terms. It extends the air of mystery and sanctity that’s key to how bassist Laura Lee Ochoa, drummer Donald “DJ” Johnson, Jr. and guitarist Mark “Marko” Speer approach music. Yet if 2020’s Mordechai, the last studio album Khruangbin made without collaborators, was a party record whose ensuing post-lockdown tour enhanced the band’s musical reputation far and wide, A La Sala is the measured morning after. It’s a gorgeously airy album made only in the company of the group’s longtime 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.

It is also a response to the unique moment Khruangbin finds itself in now: following a decade spent cultivating extraordinary music paths, beginning a year when they’ll perform for more people, in more iconic spaces, staging a live show that pushes a creative envelope peculiar to them alone. (Look for the band at major festivals and venues near you.) 2024 feels like both marker and pivot, cementing Khruangbin’s stature as a commercially and critically successful group that continues to be guided by creative possibilities.