photo: David Black

***

When Laura Lee Ochoa was young, she had a very specific way of gathering her family members together when she wanted their attention.

“My mom always tells this story that I would run around the house and I would point to the living room and say, ‘A la sala, a la sala,” Khruangbin’s wig-clad bassist and singer says years later, as she sits for a Zoom conversation before a tour stop in New Mexico this past April. “It meant, ‘Everybody needs to go to the living room right now. That’s where I want to play, and I want everyone to play with me.’”

That particular phrase, a Spanish expression most directly translated as “to the living room,” served as the title for the dub version of “Evan Finds the Third Room,” a popular song off Khruangbin’s sophomore set, 2019’s Con Todo El Mundo. And now it is also the name of the trio’s fourth LP and second for Dead Oceans— their first full-length release since a 2022 collaboration with Vieux Farka Touré, Ali, and their first record of their own material since 2020’s Mordechai.

“‘A la sala’ is what I said to Mark and DJ,” the bassist says, referencing her bandmates, guitarist Mark Speer and drummer Donald “DJ” Johnson, the latter of whom is also currently sitting for this interview. “It was like, ‘Let’s go record an album before I give birth—now.’”

Khruangbin started working on the material that eventually surfaced on A La Sala in March of 2023, following a period of post-pandemic touring that found the group moving up to marquee rooms like New York’s Radio City Music Hall and fabled outdoor spaces like Berkeley, Calif.’s The Greek Theatre. For the first time, in advance of working on A La Sala, the members of Khruangbin made the collective decision to focus on the road in 2022 and, conversely, not perform at all for a year in order to write and record. Throughout the studio sessions, Ochoa was also pregnant with her first child, who recently turned 1.

“We hit the ground running,” Johnson says. “As soon as the calendar flipped to 2023, we were compiling different ideas and concepts to bring to the sessions so that we would have things to work on when we got there. Before that, we were on tour, and there’s not a lot of space to really dig in when you’re touring because your attention is so spread out between playing shows and the other day-to-day stuff that happens.”

Khruangbin formed out of a local musical community in Houston; Speer and Johnson initially met 20 years ago while playing at a Methodist church, where Johnson supplied organ, and bonded over their love of world music. Likewise, the guitarist and Ochoa connected through friends and quickly realized that they shared an appreciation for international music. While touring with electronic musician Yppah, including dates with Bonobo, Ochoa and Speer decided to form their own global-leaning psychedelic funk/ soul project and brought Johnson into the fold on drums. They remained heavily rooted in Texas for several years, though Ochoa has since relocated to Brooklyn, N.Y., and Speer now resides in the Bay Area. So, when the trio congregated in 2023 to begin work on their next album, they arrived with a Dropbox full of ideas in various stages of completion.

“We had never had that designation—we were always going back and forth between touring and recording, and the headspace you are in when you are touring is so different from when you are writing that we wanted to have a concentrated time to write,” says Ochoa, who has long kept a notebook of musical ideas, first on paper and later on her phone. “And while some ideas happen in the studio when we’re all there, we find it helpful to have a starting point and, in order to do that, we had to have a bank of various ideas that we can pull from, and some of those were old songs.”

The trio spent two weeks playing around with various rough sketches; they sat together, listening through each potential tune. Ochoa numbered the tracks, assigning each composition a working title. They’d toy with ideas and dig into themes they all gravitated toward. The individual members brought some concepts to the table, while others stemmed from soundcheck jams that Johnson recorded and archived. Speer started the simmering “May Ninth” two decades ago, but the song had never found a home. Similarly, the meditative, cosmic “Ada Jean” has been kicking around since their debut, 2015’s The Universe Smiles Upon You.

“Sometimes songs don’t make it, not because they’re not great, but either because it doesn’t fit the central thesis of the album or it doesn’t fit sonically,” Ochoa says. “Other times, the song just doesn’t feel resoled or finished yet, so it’s like, ‘OK, well, just put it back in the bank and pull it out next time.’”

“Sometimes songs just need the time to develop, marinate and grow, and sometimes you may not be in the right headspace to work on a particular song at a particular time,” Johnson adds. “‘Ada Jean’ was one of the ones that wasn’t right for that time, and we reopened it this time around and really put some time into it and approached it with a maturity. You’re almost 10 years older and you’re able to approach it in a different way and really give the song what it deserves at this point in time. And it just so happened that now was the right time to put it on an album.”

“Les Petits Gris,” the record’s intimate, piano-based closing selection, was the first fully backed idea that truly clicked. It served as a compass of sorts for the rest of the material.

“Each day I would pull out my list and be like, ‘OK, somebody pick one.’ I had little color-coded notes like, ‘This idea has had more than one person’s stamp on it, or this idea has an A and a B part,” Ochoa says. “A lot of the time, we started out with more fleshed out thoughts, which I think is how some of the old songs were able to make it on to the record. They were actually more developed than the things that were just a little snippet of something.”

***

Since their salad days, Khruangbin have retreated, creatively, to a barn on Speer’s family property. The space is located in Burton, Texas, a small town of about 300 people, and has long served as their clubhouse and studio. But, in an unexpected move, the trio decided to track A La Sala in their producer Steve Christensen’s Houston studio for several reasons, including the impending birth of Ochoa’s baby.

“It was more of a logistical decision to be honest,” Johnson says. “It takes a lot of time to get to the barn—the drive is not super long, but when you’re talking about breaking down all the gear and all the cables, putting it in a truck, shipping it all the way to the barn, unloading it all, unpacking it and then hooking up everything again, it’s a weeklong process to get things running again. We didn’t really have the luxury to take a week off to do that because we really needed to spend the time writing and recording. So we decided to do everything at Steve’s spot in Houston.”

A Grammy-winning engineer, who has worked with Steve Earle and Robert Ellis, Christensen has been with the band since their early EPs, and Johnson equates recording at his studio to visiting a family member. Khruangbin had already used his downtown studio for their sessions with Touré and a similar project with indie-soul singer Leon Bridges. To capture the barn’s vibe, for A La Sala, Christensen pumped field noises into the musicians’ headphones while they worked. (Some of those ambient sounds can still be heard on the final recordings.)

“It still felt like home,” Johnson says. “It wasn’t like being in a foreign space or anything, and we really enjoyed the process of working there. Most studios are cavernous, casino environments, with lots of equipment, blinking lights and no clocks. Steve’s is more like a home environment, so it was really comfortable. We had crickets and bird noises playing very softly as we recorded. And that put us in a certain space and makes it less sterile—not to say that Steve’s studio is sterile at all. It’s not—it has tons of windows and lots of natural lighting.”

“And cat hair,” Ochoa interjects, briefly cutting off her bandmate, as she describes Christensen, a cat lover whose website is actually mixingandcats.com.

Partway through the recording, they also made the decision not to bring in any outside guests, a hallmark of their studio albums since their earliest days, and focus on the band’s core members this time around. It was part of a larger, but still subtle shift to recenter the group and inch back toward their origins.

“Normally, when we bring in our friends to play on the record, that’s more at the very end of the process. It’s mostly overdubbing after the three of us have played the complete song together and we’ve got a really good take of it,” Johnson says. “But when we got to that point in the recording process, we didn’t really need them, so we just wanted some space. This record felt more intimate, zoomed in and focused. So the space to allow that to happen was really important. A lot of the things that we add along the way end up getting muted as well. You put everything on and see what works, and eventually, when it’s all said and done, there’s a lot of stuff that you record that doesn’t actually make the record.

“There have been times when we’ve played a conga part on this one song or added a string part or two and then, eventually, you step away from it and you come back to it months later when it’s out of the mix and you realize, ‘Do we really need that?’” he continues. “So the conga part that you spent hours working on gets the mute button and no one ever hears it.”

They also decided to lean into their instrumental side, a signature part of Khruangbin’s early tracks. Though the group has gradually added in more vocal tunes, especially on their previous set, Mordechai, which spiked their always vibey sound with more lyrical, Tom Tom Club-approved compositions, they dialed that back on A La Sala. In fact, they intentionally chose an instrumental cut, “A Love International”—a driving, groovy tune featuring some choice African surf-blues guitar tones—as the LP’s first single.

“On the one hand, we never want to say that we’re gonna write a song with or without vocals at this point,” Ochoa says. “It just depends on if the song wants them. We record all the instrumentation first— that’s always been the way that Khruangbin has worked. So the music comes first and then the lyrics and vocals come after that, almost like they’re supplemental. As a unit, collectively we can listen to a song and go, ‘OK, this needs something else. It’s time to put lyrics on there.’ We did all feel like the last album was really vocal heavy, and it’s interesting because that album was inspired by being on tour and the upbeat-ness of tour, so we leaned into that for Mordechai. But then, what you forget about playing live is that, when there are vocals, we’re chained to the mic. So then, in a way, we miss some of the dynamic energy of traversing the stage.”

Ochoa says that she and Speer tried some Broadway-style headsets while touring Mordechai, but they weren’t entirely happy with the results.

“We can sing and move, but they just don’t sound great,” the bassist says. “And it makes it really complicated so we wanted to pare back the vocals a bit so we have more freedom. It also let us lean into that initial Khruangbin sound where Mark is the singer because he sings so well on guitar. When there are too many vocals, the only thing he can do is play rhythm and he doesn’t always love that.”

***

In March, Khruangbin officially kicked off their A La Sala era with three extremely intimate fan-club shows at New York’s storied Bowery Ballroom. It marked the group’s first live appearance since a New Zealand stop in late 2022 and their first Bowery play since 2016. The gigs sold out instantly and felt like a rebirth after the musicians’ longest non-pandemic-related break from the road to date.

“It was this sigh of comfort because I’d been practicing these songs for a few months leading up to our rehearsals ahead of Bowery, and I got to a place where I couldn’t really practice any more than I had without playing with Mark and DJ,” Ochoa says. “And there were so many nerves about how these songs were gonna translate live, how this show was gonna go and how this new concept was gonna work onstage. You just have all of these doubts, and then Mark and DJ and I met up and we played through the album. And, the first time we did it, I said, ‘This works and I love playing with them.’ There was a sense of relief, not that there was any doubt that it gonna work. I’m so glad that I have this thing.”

Each of the shows also kicked off with a surprise: On the first night, David Byrne put together a special house-music playlist, the next evening Questlove DJed and, on the third day, Speer took a turn behind the decks.

“Questlove actually introduced us to our manager, who is one of his managers,” Ochoa explains. “So we now have a work connection in addition to this personal admiration and mutual admiration for each other. He’s been a wonderful supporter for a long time, and we asked him if he’d be up for DJing one of these shows. We wanted to give our fan-club members and the people that traveled to come see us something unique at every show and took the approach that we were gonna be the only live act, which I think is how we kind of went with this DJ route. I met David Byrne on our last tour cycle. He came to our Prospect Park show in Brooklyn, N.Y., and I freaked out because he’s such an icon and such an inspiration from so many standpoints in music. He’s become a friend and he’s an amazing supporter to have in your pocket. I asked him if he’d be up for DJing, and he was like, ‘What if I just wanted to play bird sounds?’ And I was like, ‘That would be totally fine,’ but he actually pieced together pieces of music and crafted a whole mix.”

From Ochoa and Speer’s trademark wigs to the group’s well-defined fashion sense and album imagery, the members of Khruangbin have long had a pronounced visual element, and they took an active role in designing the look of their stage show.

“The music always comes first in every aspect, before we name the album, before we know what the album looks like,” Ochoa says. “So there was the process of recording the music and then coming up with the title and what the album artwork was gonna look like. We had to take some pictures for the record and we decided to take them in front of this window, mirroring the album cover. When we were taking those pictures, I remember DJ and I both looking at each other and being like, ‘I know what the stage is gonna look like.’ Mark drew it out on a little Post-it note, and that’s what our stage is. Now, we are translating this living room idea to the stage and bringing people into our comfort space—tying the visuals into the album. It’s really an exciting process to watch the whole thing evolve.”

When Khruangbin first started gaining national attention circa 2016, they seemed to emerge from the ether. And while the musicians’ individual live-performance roots lie more in the electronic, gospel and Texas bar-scene worlds, the jamband community embraced them early on, thanks to their psychedelic vibes, instrumental grooves and overall musicality. Since first breaking out, they have collaborated with Trey Anastasio and scored prime spots on jam-friendly festivals like Sacred Rose and LOCKN’.

“While we are not a jamband, we are very much inspired by the jam community in so many ways,” Ochoa says. “The spirit of the crowds is exceptional, and their commitment to musicianship is really inspiring, especially in this age where so much music is electronic and live music is played to tracks. I think the spirit of live music and the importance of it to the jam community is really important to us.”

“I really do appreciate the aspect of the jam community that is about playing instruments live,” Johnson adds, picking up Ochoa’s thoughts. “We recently played Coachella and, if you look at the lineup, there’s not really a lot of bands left anymore. The entire time we were there, we were waving that flag and keeping that alive. Live music is so important to us, and to a lot of people, and we really appreciate that.

For their current run, the musicians are making an effort to keep their setlists fresh each night and embrace unique onstage moments as they arise.

“We do know that there are people coming to three shows in a row, depending on where we’re playing,” Ochoa says. “We want to appease that part of our community and our audience.”

“We’re at a special point in touring when the songs from the record are still relatively new to the audience and also new to us because we’re just playing them in front of the audience for the first time,” Johnson says, offering a quasistate-of-the union address on the band’s live dynamic. “Everything’s still fresh and evolving, so this is a part of the process that I really enjoy—watching the evolution of the songs take place as you play them from night to night. Of course, when you start out, the songs are more or less true to what you put on the record and then slowly, as time goes on, things start to take shape and have a life of their own, and then you have an entirely different version of what you played. And that’s just a special thing that happens. You can’t really quantify it because there are these small, tiny moves that happen from night to night. But, over the course of time, and by the end of this touring cycle, the live versions of these songs will sound different. I personally am really excited about that process. I can see it starting to take shape already, very early.