Mark Speer, left, and Laura Lee Ochoa, of Khruangbin
If you think your Spotify playlist is getting a little too long, consider the one shared by the members of Khruangbin. It’s got 51 hours of songs.
“I’m trying to listen to as many different things as possible before they all start to sound kind of the same,” says Mark Speer, the trio’s guitarist and musical explorer, capturing interesting sounds from Thailand to the Middle East.
“We lose Mark sometimes for a small period of time because he’s on an anthropological dig,” says bassist Laura Lee. Drummer Donald “DJ” Johnson finishes her thought: “For the quintessential Chinese funk.”
The mainly instrumental Khruangbin’s sonic explorations have paid off of late, with a warmly received 2024 album, “A La Sala,” that reached the top 40 of the Billboard 200 and a Grammy Award nomination for best new artist. Not that any of that is going to their heads.
“I think we’re just going to keep leaning in what we do and keep trying to be more the silhouette version of ourselves as much as we can and let the music speak for itself, because that’s who we are. We don’t like the spotlight in that way,” says Lee.
The Texas trio makes music that’s hard to describe, a mix of soul, surf rock, psychedelic and funk that creates a melodic, Afro-pop-inspired, reverb-heavy sound with nods to other cultures. The band’s name is appropriately travel-related — Khruangbin is the Thai word for airplane.
“Mark’s storytelling feels like words, even though there are no words. And my storytelling feels like math even though there are no numbers necessarily. And D.J. is the translator between my language and Mark somehow,” says Lee.
They are highly collaborative, working in the studio and performing live with Leon Bridges on two EPs, Paul McCartney, Vieux Farka Touré, Wu-Tang Clan, Childish Gambino, Toro Y Moi, Men I Trust and more.
For “A La Sala,” Khruangbin focused on the trio, realizing that they didn’t need anyone else in the studio. They say that was empowering.
“I think because we had just been through a process of collaborating quite a lot, it felt important for us to just huddle, just the three of us,” says Lee. “When it’s just the three of us, it’s like a deep breath and a collective sigh.”
Most of their music is instrumental, but vocals — either ghostly or a full-on lyric song — have been employed, like on “May Ninth” from the new album, with the lyrics “Memory burned and gone/A multicolored gray.”
“The music comes first,” says Johnson. “And when we finish putting everything together, if we feel that it needs one more thing, something missing, or we just want a vocal texture, then usually we go down the path of adding that.” MARK KENNEDY, MDT/AP
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