Strange Days
with Khruangbin,
At Home in Amiri

Last September, during a month of downtime, Lee went in search of the real life she’d been missing out on, reuniting with friends for a camping trip. On that trip she met a man named Mordechai, for whom the band’s latest album is named. “I think he saw that my head was spinning, and [after the trip] he messaged me and said, ‘If you’re ever in my neck of the woods, come over. I’d love to introduce you to my family.’” She took him up on his offer, and went hiking with him and his wife and children. “I hadn’t had a day like that in years,” she says. “I felt so moved by the fact that he reached out, not knowing me, not knowing Khruangbin.” Before they set off, Mordechai mentioned that they’d be hiking to a waterfall. Lee pictured an idyllic pool at the bottom of a cascade where they could swim, but the group climbed to the top. The only way down was to jump. “I’ve jumped a lot in my life,” Lee says. “I’ve taken a lot of risks, but I haven’t taken the risk into my own self-nurturing. When I jumped that day, I was jumping for me.” This experience prompted pages and pages of notes and lyrics, some of which ended up on Mordechai, released in late June. “It’s hard to talk about it, because I realize it’s a cliche,” she says. “But it wasn’t a cliche for me. I had a really genuine human connection.”

To best understand Lee’s story—how she got so wrapped up in a band, how that band, largely instrumental, with a name that’s difficult for English speakers to pronounce (it’s Krung-bin, which comes from a Thai word that means “flying engine”), then became extremely popular, even though their work seemed out of step with the rest of popular music—it helps to reckon with the core appeal of the music the trio makes and how their project developed.

In 2004, Speer and Johnson met while playing in the same Church gospel band. Three years after that, Speer met Lee. They bonded when Lee went over to a co-worker’s house, and Speer was there watching a documentary about Afghan music. It seems obvious to say that the three members came together over their mutual love of music, but that enthusiasm for pure sound, and the stories and sonic flourishes behind it, are what elevates Khruangbin above other groove-obsessed indie bands.

From the start, Khruangbin have been making blunted, transcendent psychedelic jams that evoke late evening sunsets and curls of incense smoke rising across a humid orange sky. It’s a sound borne of omnivorous and voracious music-listening, of an obsessive catalog of influences smashed together into music that seems readymade to be discovered in a dusty record crate, flipped, sampled and turned into something new. Though Khruangbin is about the artistry of making music, and what happens when three like-minded people get together to create, it’s also, at least subconsciously, a meditation on what it means to be a music fan, and how an enthusiasm for music can bloom outward into a project that mines its influences even as it breaks new ground.

Though Mordechai sounds like a direct continuation from Khruangbin’s 2018 sophomore LP, Con Todo El Mundo, and 2015’s The Universe Smiles Upon You, it’s actually a bit of a recalibration for the band. Since the release of Con Todo, the world fully caught on to Khruangbin’s imperfectly perfect vibes: They jammed with Phish’s Trey Anastasio, recorded a lush EP of soulful country funk with Leon Bridges, and, last year, released Hasta El Cielo (Con Todo El Mundo in Dub), a blunted and hypnotic reworking of their second album, complete with a pair of remixes from dub legend The Scientist. Their music has always been simple, but endlessly listenable, full of unexpected pockets and instrumental nooks to get lost in.

For Mordechai, the trio took ideas and sketches garnered from their many collaborative detours to a barn in Burton, Texas, an hour and change drive from Houston, where they’d previously spent winters working on their other records. This time, though, it was spring. The weather was warmer, the barn wasn’t freezing, the atmosphere was a bit looser. The barn is not the kind of sterile environment you get with a standard recording studio. During recordings, planes sometimes flew overhead, or a dog barked in the distance. Maybe a spider would crawl across Johnson’s snare. Like they’d done in the past, Khruangbin leaned into their environment, eschewing perfection in favor of an open arms approach to sonics. If some weird noise made its way into the recordings, there was a good chance it’d stay there, even if it wasn’t obvious to listeners. “Birds, squeaks...there’s this tree that squeaks against the side of the barn,” Speer says. “It’s part of the vibe. We’re not really interested in being super isolated from the world. I like having the birds and the wind and the bugs.”

Though Speer is speaking literally about being isolated, the way they maybe would be in a traditional studio, there’s a greater point about Khruangbin embedded in his words. We’re not really interested in being super isolated from the world might as well be the band’s thesis statement. “Mark is constantly recording field recordings and always encourages us to do the same,” Lee says. “They’re almost like Easter eggs. You’re putting another memory or sound that is personal to you into the record.” There’s a story you’ve probably heard before about how, after seeing some success, some bands will escape to the wilderness to reconnect with themselves and tap into some kind of dormant, internal genius that can supposedly only be activated when cut off from distracting sensory cues like “other people” or “culture in general.” That story largely makes no sense for a band like Khruangbin, whose members thrive on the kind of heady immersion that comes with sharing songs in real life, making playlists for their fans that lay bare their influences, or tweaking their instrumental formula to include a new subgenre or style. In other words, the band is an ideal expression of the roving, interconnected lives we lead before the devastation of COVID-19, and Mordechai is a blueprint for how to get back to that, whenever that might be.

Sonically, the album hops from the classic-in-the-making disco break of “Time (You and I)”, to the dubbed-out meditation of “One to Remember,” the borderline-balearic ripple of “So We Won’t Forget,” and the syrupy slow, achingly gorgeous twinkle of “Father Bird, Mother Bird.” Like all the best Khruangbin songs, the tracks on Mordechai give back as much as you put in. Maybe you’ve got the album on in the background while you’re cooking dinner or following up on a missing paycheck, or maybe you’re staring, eyes glazed, at a bird arcing across a humid June sky, focusing on every single note. No matter how you’re taking it in, the point is always the same: this is music that is meant to exist in tandem with the lives we live. It is not an escape, so much as an embrace of what is around us.

It’s telling, then, that the band gets most animated when they get to talk about music they love, but didn’t have a hand in making. In talking about how Houston’s musical scene has affected Khruangbin’s sound, the imposing cross-genre influence of DJ Screw comes up almost immediately. DJ Screw, a figure who initially gained renown on the Southern rap circuit before he died in 2000, created the chopped and screwed style of DJing, in which he’d slow down and chop up records to draw songs long past their original run time, deepen voices, and disorient by running bits of songs back to hypnotic effect. Though Screw was revered while he was alive, the long tail of his influence has stretched across genre and continent. “We were doing Japanese press and DJ Screw came up,” Johnson says. “I didn’t really know the true definition of psychedelic music until recently, but then Mark told me that DJ Screw was totally psychedelic. Slowing it down...all the effects. It’s super psych. His sound changed the world.”

It’s in this moment that Johnson and the rest of the band sound most comfortable. Speer echoes his appreciation, before talking a bit more about the artistry behind Screw’s mixtapes. He doesn’t say it out loud, but his point is clear: this is what Khruangbin is all about, sharing enthusiasm for the music they love with whoever is willing to listen.

Sam Hockley-Smith is a writer and editor living in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in The FADER, The New York Times Magazine, Pitchfork, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, GQ, Vulture, and more.