Khruangbin Returns With New Album ‘A La Sala’ & Shares Buoyant ‘A Love International’ Single

Khruangbin will issue their first studio album in four years, A La Sala, on April 5 via Dead Oceans/Night Time Stories Ltd. The Houston, Texas-based trio also shared the lead single, “A Love International.” Vinyl editions of the record will arrive in seven cover variations.

A La Sala is Khruangbin’s studio follow-up to 2020’s Mordechai. The band also released Live At Sydney Opera House in late 2023 and teamed with renowned Malian guitarist Vieux Farka Touré for a collaborative record, Ali — paying tribute to Vieux’s father Ali Farka Touré — in 2022. Translated from Spanish to English, A La Sala means “To The Room.”

Khruangbin — guitarist Mark Speer, bassist Laura Lee and drummer DJ Johnson — pieced together A La Sala from “off-the-cuff recordings (voice-memos made at sound-checks, on long voyages, as absentminded epiphanies),” as per a press release. The press materials further described the 12-track LP:

“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.

Other results are more metaphorical, especially in Khruangbin’s flirtation with ambient spaces. The dramatically beatless “Farolim de Felgueiras” and “Caja de la Sala” both feature only Marko’s unmistakable guitar dueting with Laura Lee’s Moog, lightly layered with sounds of shoes on stone steps, and cicadas in an open field. The closing “Les Petits Gris” more fully reduces and fleshes out the ambiance, with a piano and a simple single-note bass pattern, Marko’s plaintive spare guitar echoing the melody of a ballerina-turning music box. It feels an apt way of ending — as a passing of this particular moment, preparation for the next one, soon-come.

Preview A La Sala with the Scott Dungate-directed video for “A Love International” 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
12. Les Petits Gris