Indies only Limited Edition Gold vinyl.

Khruangbin’s fourth studio album, ‘A La Sala’ (‘To the Room’ in Spanish), is an exercise in returning in order to go further, and doing so on your own terms. It continues the mystery and sanctity that is the key to how bassistLaura Lee Ochoa, drummer Donald ‘DJ’ Johnson Jr. and guitarist Mark ‘Marko’ Speer approach music. If 2020’s ‘Mordechai’, the last studio LP. Khruangbin made without collaborators, was a party record that enhancedthe band’s musical reputation far and wide, then ‘A La Sala’ is the measured morning after. It’s a gorgeously airy record completed only in the company ofthe group’s longtime engineer, Steve Christensen, with minimal overdubs.It’s a window onto the bounties powering Khruangbin’s vision, a reimaginingand refuelling for the long haul ahead. ‘A La Sala’ scales Khruangbin down to scale up, a creative strategy with the future in mind.

The trio’s collective musical DNA, the years spent constructing it in Houston’s local-meets-global cultural stew, ensures the band continues tosound like no one but itself. A cascade of crisp melodies emanates from Marko’s reverb-heavy electric, dancing gently around Laura Lee’s minimalist, almost-dub bass triangles, while DJ’s drums serve as the tightened-uppocket and unwavering dancefloor on which all this movement takes place. Yet there’s a freshness to ‘A La Sala’’s instrumental interactivity, less concerned with getting further out than going deeper in, a profound desire tocelebrate the world’s external wonders.

Where prior albums strived towards music’s polyglot edges, such inquiries now sound like beloved intimacies. Here, Khruangbin’s sonic touch-points -whether spaghetti-western film scores (on ‘Fifteen Fifty-Three’), West African discos (on ‘Pon Pón’), G-funk fantasias (‘Todavía Viva’), living room dancingmoments (the first single, ‘A Love International’), or even ambient foundsounds (on ‘Farolim de Felgueiras’ and throughout the album) – are ingrained characteristics. This is who they are. Unique and huge (and growing), ambitious and driven.

Khruangbin’s aspirations and commitment to playful creativity even extendsto ‘A La Sala’’s vinyl packages. Designed by the band using Marko’s multitude of travelogue photos, the images are windows from the band’sliving room onto a set of daydreams, scenes of impossible skies, external glances that illuminate what is going on inside. These too are all aboutlooking out and looking back, in order to better look ahead.