Something rather unexpected happened to past Uproxx cover artists Khruangbin during lockdown. It wasn’t just that their 2020 album Mordechai was well received when it gave people an ideal soundtrack to lounge at home when that’s all any of us could safely do. It’s that it was like…really well received. So much so that as soon as COVID restrictions began to soften and Khruangbin started playing shows again, the Houston-formed, world music-minded trio quickly found themselves playing to the biggest crowds of their career. They were blowing up.
“It felt like going from lifting a 15 pound dumbbell to a 40 pound one,” drummer DJ Johnson says on a Zoom call from Switzerland along with bassist Laura Lee. “If you throw the 2017 version of us in front of the same audiences that we’re playing now, it would’ve been a complete meltdown. It’s the steps you take in between that gives you what you need along the way to be able to do it. We really had to work at it.”
Two hours after our call, Khruangbin would be playing in front of 15,000 people at the Luzern Live Festival. It’s a sizable crowd, on par with some of the venues the band will be playing for on the upcoming dates of the A LA SALA Tour. From August onward, Johnson, Lee, and guitarist Mark Speer are playing multiple night “residency” style stops at giant venues like the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, Forest Hills Stadium in New York, and Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre. It’s a testament not only to Khruangbin’s surging popularity, but also to how much their live set has grown.
At a 2022 show at Berkeley’s Greek Theatre, I was struck by the evolution of the group’s concert. Five years earlier, a mechanical approach of delivering their music to the audience suited a stony, vibey aura of a chill and relaxed mindset. Then far more enigmatic, Speer and Lee’s wigged heads and bodies swayed while their feet moved sparsely. But at the Greek, there was a palpable kinetic energy from the pair while Johnson paced the beat behind them, emboldening the set and introducing new emotions to the Khruangbin experience. Speer and Lee took turns stepping into an elevated catwalk splitting the audience, coyly dancing to the rhythms of the globe and playing off of each other’s vibrations. It was subtle choreography, but it really made the music come alive and introduced new levels to the artist-fan connection.
Now touring behind their April-released album, A LA SALA, Khruangbin could very well be playing in arenas. But they’ve decided to play multiple night runs at outdoor amphitheaters instead. It’s a conscious choice they made on their own terms for a couple of reasons. First, it’s giving themselves an opportunity to flex their entire four album discography (not counting collaboration releases with Leon Bridges and Vieux Farka Toure.)
“We decided to steer the reins of where we wanted to go,” Lee says. “Because by playing two to three nights in each city, it allows us more freedom to play more of our entire catalog and we want the fans that are going to come every night to have a different experience each time. And we want that too! Because in the Mordecai run, the way the show was programmed hamstrung us a bit in terms of how much freedom we had.”
Lee says the three of them huddle before any meeting they’re going to have with anyone outside of the band to ensure that they’re always on the same page with each other. And while their stature within the live music world essentially had them pegged for arenas as the next natural step, Lee credits advice from Speer that led her on a journey of sorts to understand why an arena is not where Khruangbin will be playing anytime soon.
“Mark was always dead set on not playing arenas specifically for sonics and connections. He told me that, ‘You play melodic bass lines and they won’t work in an arena. It’s better to just have one note bass lines where you hammer it home because that’s how the room takes it, that’s what the room wants — and the room is not going to take the intricacies of some of what we do and really sing.’ So I spent quite a bit of time the last couple of years going to arena shows, specifically to see what works and what doesn’t work. What I liked and didn’t like. So I got on board with the “not going there” piece not out of fear, but that it’s just not what suits us right now. Maybe there’ll be a record where it really works, but not for what we’re doing at this moment.”
It’s a refreshing take in an era where the corporate live music promoter model is to keep growing a band from the small capacity space into a mid-sized venue and so on down the line until eventually landing an arena tour; that’s where the big money is. Who knows what a Khruangbin arena show would look like? Would they add more members to the band to make the sound bigger and bolder? That’s not something the trio is into finding out anytime soon. Because what makes this unit so phenomenal, is that it’s still the same three people making all of the sounds that so many fans have grown to love.
“We take it as a challenge,” Johnson says. “That whatever we put down is something that can be recreated on stage with just three people, without having to rely on backing tracks or bringing another entity on board. It’s like being a minimalist and a maximalist at the same time.”