In Grammy spotlight, Khruangbin wants to 'let the music speak for itself'
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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.
