Khruangbin Mordechai LP

Khruangbin, the Houston-based group comprised of bassist Laura Lee Ochoa, guitarist Mark Speer and drummer Donald "DJ" Johnson, release their new album, Mordechai, on Dead Oceans, in association with Night Time Stories. Mordechai comes two years after the release of their beloved and acclaimed breakthrough, 2018's Con Todo El Mundo, and was preceded earlier this year by Texas Sun, the group's collaborative EP with Leon Bridges.

Khruangbin has always been multilingual, weaving far-flung musical languages like East Asian surf-rock, Persian funk and Jamaican dub into mellifluous harmony. As a first for the mostly instrumental band, Mordechai features vocals prominently on nearly every song. It's a shift that rewards the risk, reorienting Khruangbin's transportive sound toward a new sense of emotional directness, without losing the spirit of nomadic wandering that's always defined it. And it all started with them coming home.

Travel weary and without a home after 24 itinerant months of travel and touring, Laura Lee went on a hike with a family of strangers, led by a father named Mordechai. Here, on this least expected journey after so many others, she found spiritual awakening and rebirth. Known already for drawing on the music of locales like Thailand and Iran, Khruangbin found their most diverse and global influence by looking inward, returning to their hometown and America's most diverse city: Houston, TX. Musically, the band's ever-restless ear saw them pulling reference points from Pakistan, Korea and West Africa, incorporating strains of Indian chanting boxes and Congolese syncopated guitar. But more than anything, Mordechai became a celebration of Houston, the eclectic city that had nurtured them, and a cultural nexus where you can check out country and zydeco, trap rap, or avant-garde opera on any given night.