Summer Deep Dive: Khruangbin's "A Love International"
"The music you would hear playing inside a lava lamp"
Khruangbin (it means “airplane” in Thai) is a Houston band which consists of Laura Lee Ochoa on bass, Mark Speer on guitar, and DJ Johnson on drums. Their music defies easy categorization; it is mostly instrumental and includes elements of funk, surf-rock, and eastern harmonies.
Although I cannot find the writer (which I certainly wish was myself), the best description I have heard of Khruangbin is that it sounds like “the music you would hear playing inside a lava lamp.”
“A La Sala” is the band’s fourth studio album and its first since 2020’s Mordechai, a more experimental effort which included Khruangbin’s first use of vocals. “A La Sala” also uses vocals, but they are generally in support of the languid, guitar- based grooves that characterized Khruangbin’s early work. Laura Lee Ochoa explains:
I used to scream “A La Sala” around my house when I was a little girl, to get everybody in the living room; to get my famil…
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