Khruangbin – “A Love International” [Video]

Khruangbin have returned 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.

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.

MORE INFO ON KHRUANGBIN

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