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The Flaming Lips Add Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots 20th Anniversary Tour Dates

By Allison Hussey

The Flaming Lips have extended their 20th anniversary celebration of their 2002 album, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots , adding several more shows in the United States where they’ll play through their well-known LP in full. See the full schedule with the previously announced Yoshimi dates below.

Last year, the Flaming Lips reissued Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots with B-sides and other previously unreleased material in an expansive CD set, with a 5xLP vinyl set to follow on April 14. New vinyl editions of the band’s EPs Fight Test  and  Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell arrive on March 17.

After issuing American Head in 2020, the band shared The Soft Bulletin Companion , a collection of alternate tracks and other material recorded between 1997 and 1999. The Flaming Lips are set to perform at Boston Calling alongside Paramore, Foo Fighters, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and more at the end of May.

All products featured on Pitchfork are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

The Flaming Lips:

02-28 Vancouver, British Columbia - Commodore Ballroom 03-01 Vancouver, British Columbia - Commodore Ballroom 03-03 Stateline, NV - Harrah’s Lake Tahoe 03-04 Las Vegas, NV - Brooklyn Bowl 03-06 Del Mar, CA - The Sound - Del Mar Fairgrounds 03-07 Anaheim, CA - House of Blues 03-09 Santa Barbara, CA - Arlington Theatre 04-25 London, England - Troxy 04-28 London, England - Eventim Apollo 04-29 Manchester, England - O2 Apollo 05-05 Chicago, IL - The Salt Shed 05-07 Atlanta, GA - Shaky Knees Festival 05-08 Charlotte, NC - The Fillmore 05-10 Knoxville, TN - Tennessee Theatre 05-11 Nashville, TN - Ryman Auditorium 05-11-13 Live Oak, FL - Echoland Music Festival 05-25 Washington, DC - The Anthem 05-27 Boston, MA - Boston Calling Festival 06-08 Brooklyn, NY - Kings Theatre 06-11 Cleveland, OH - Agora Theater & Ballroom 06-13 Milwaukee, WI - The Riverside Theater 06-14 St. Louis, MO - Saint Louis Music Park 06-16 Omaha, NE - Steelhouse 06-18 Tulsa, OK - Tulsa Theater 08-18 Los Angeles, CA - YouTube Theater 08-22 Portland, OR - Pioneer Courthouse Square 08-23 Seattle, WA - Woodland Park Zoo 08-25 Bonner, MT - KettleHouse Amphitheatre

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The flaming lips, yoshimi battles the pink robots, thu, july 25, 2024, thompson's point, doors: 6:00pm - show: 7:30pm - all ages, $49.50 advance $59.50 day of show.

All Thompson’s Point shows are rain or shine. Buy tickets in person (without fees) at the State Theatre box office Fridays 10am-5pm, or the night of any State Theatre show. The Thompson’s Point Box Office opens 2 hours before doors day of show. Please note that ticket prices may fluctuate based on demand. On-site parking is very limited, buy in advance above. CLICK HERE for more transportation info.

Released in July 2002, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots remains the commercial high-water mark in The Flaming Lips’ wild four-decade journey, giving the GRAMMY® award-winners their first RIAA certified Gold Record. As the eagerly awaited follow-up to 1999’s masterwork, The Soft Bulletin, Yoshimi proved that singer/guitarist Wayne Coyne and multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd had yet another masterpiece in them.

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is a sci-fi-themed quasi-concept album that cast The Flaming Lips’ most playful and profound songs to date in a wondrous swirl of ambient electronics, digital beats, and psychedelic splendor. The record yielded the band’s top-streamed track, “Do You Realize??” (a timeless stargazing anthem that, in 2009, was named the Official Rock Song of the band’s native Oklahoma) and also landed the Lips their first-ever Grammy Award® win for the cosmic album-closing instrumental “Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon (Utopia Planitia).”

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Published: 2024/02/21

The Flaming Lips Extend ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots’ 2024 Tour

The Flaming Lips have extended the Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots 2024 Tour, continuing to celebrate two decades of the band’s breakthrough 2002 album of the same name. Each night, the band will perform the project in its entirety, as well as other favorites from the band’s celebrated 41-year catalog. This update adds 15 shows to a tour that has endured since last spring and will now continue through the end of this summer.

After a previously announced week of Deep South dates that will run through Florida, South Carolina, Alabama and Louisiana from April 20 to April 26, The Flaming Lips will venture into the desert, for a May 17 show at Albuquerque, N.M.’s Revel. The following night, the band will headline the hotly anticipated Pure Imagination Festival in Prescott, Ariz., alongside Sylvan Esso, The Pharcyde and Tanya Tucker, capping off its first 2024 run.

The Flaming Lips will return on June 21 to bring the reinvigorated Yoshimi tour to The Buddy Holly Hall in Lubbock, Texas. Through the next week, the band will make five stops around the Midwest, including appearances at the Uptown Theater in Kansas City, Mo. and the Everwise Amphitheater in Indianapolis, before concluding its June series at GLC Live at 20 Monroe Grand Rapids, Mich. on June 29. 

The band will kick off the East Coast leg of its tour with a show at Greenfield Lake Amphitheater in Wilmington, N.C. on July 16. The following evening, the Flaming Lips will light up the summit of West Virginia’s Showshoe Mountain as it headlines 4848 Festival in the company of St. Paul & the Broken Bones and Greensky Bluegrass. Next, the band will veer north for a series of dates in Pittsburgh, Lewiston, N.Y. and LaFeyette, N.Y. on July 20, 22 and 23. After four months on the road, the pioneering indie outfit will wrap up its tour with engagements in New England, first at Thompson’s Point in Portland, Maine on July 25, and finally on the shore of Lake Champlain at Burlington, Vt.’s Waterfront Park on July 26.

The Flaming Lips released the 100-track 20th-anniversary edition of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots in 2022. This reissue includes a sprawling collection of live versions and demo tracks beyond the original 11 entries. Upon its original release, the groundbreaking album marked a sonic shift for The Flaming Lips, as the group embraced electronic production even while staying true to its space rock and psychedelic roots. 

Tickets for the Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots 2024 Tour will go on sale on Friday, Feb. 23 at 10:00 a.m. local time. More ticketing information is available on flaminglips.com . Read on for the complete list of tour dates. 

The Flaming Lips 2024 Tour Dates:  April 20 – Florida Theatre – Jacksonville, Fla.  April 21 – High Water Festival – Charleston, S.C.  April 23 – Avondale Brewing Co. – Birmingham, Ala.  April 24 – Saenger Theatre – New Orleans April 26 – The Adderley Amphitheater – Tallahassee, Fla.  May 17 – Revel – Albuquerque, N.M.* May 18 – Pure Imagination Festival – Prescott, Ariz. June 21 – The Buddy Holly Hall – Lubbock, Texas* June 23 – Uptown Theater – Kansas City, Mo.* June 25 – McGrath Amphitheatre – Cedar Rapids, Iowa* June 26 – Everwise Amphitheater – Indianapolis* June 28 – Iroquois Amphitheater – Louisville, Ky.* June 29 – GLC Live at 20 Monroe– Grand Rapids, Mich.* July 16 – Greenfield Lake Amphitheater – Wilmington, N.C.* July 17 – Koka Booth Amphitheatre – Cary, N.C.* July 19 – 4848 Festival – Snowshoe, W.V.* July 20 – Stage AE – Pittsburgh*  July 22 – Artpark – Lewiston, N.Y.* July 23 – Beak & Skiff Apple Orchards – LaFeyette, N.Y.* July 25 – Thompson’s Point – Portland, Maine* July 26 – Waterfront Park – Burlington, Vt.* *new dates

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By ABC News | February 20, 2024

The flaming lips announce 2024 ’yoshimi’ anniversary tour dates.

The Flaming Lips have announced a tour continuing to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their 2002 album, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots .

The newly added dates run from May 17 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to July 26 in Burlington, Vermont. Each night, the Lips will play Yoshimi in full.

Tickets go on sale Friday, February 23, at 10 a.m. local time. For the full list of dates and all ticket info, visit FlamingLips.com .

The Flaming Lips first launched the Yoshimi  anniversary tour in 2023. They also put out a deluxe reissue in honor of the milestone.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

• Consequence

The Flaming Lips to Perform Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots on 2024 Tour

Another run featuring the band performing their 2002 magnum opus in full

The Flaming Lips will continue celebrating the 20th anniversary of  Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots by performing the album in full on a new run of 2024 US tour dates.

Kicking off on April 20th with a previously announced show in Jacksonville, Florida, the trek will continue with stops in New Orleans, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, and more. See The Flaming Lips’ full touring itinerary below.

Fans can look for deals or get tickets to sold-out shows for all of The Flaming Lips’ upcoming tour dates at StubHub , where orders are 100% guaranteed through StubHub’s FanProtect program. StubHub is a secondary market ticketing platform, and prices may be higher or lower than face value, depending on demand.

Revisit our 2022 interview with Wayne Coyne about the 20th anniversary of Yoshimi and the time Jack White gave him a fiber-optic Jesus at a Beck show. Last April, The Flaming Lips released a 20th anniversary edition   Yoshimi 5xLP box set; pick up your copy here . You can also grab a vinyl of the band’s first official greatest hits collection at their official merch store .

Get The Flaming Lips Tickets Here

The Flaming Lips 2024 Tour Dates: 04/20 – Jacksonville, FL @ Florida Theatre 04/21 – N. Charleston, SC @ High Water Festival 04/23 – Birmingham, AL @ Avondale Brewing Co 04/24 – New Orleans, LA @ Saenger Theatre 04/26 – Tallahassee, FL @ The Adderley Amphitheatre 05/17 – Albuquerque, NM @ Revel 05/18 – Prescott, AZ @ Pure Imagination Festival 06/21 – Lubbock, TX @ The Buddy Holly Hall 06/23 – Kansas City, MO @ Uptown Theater 06/25 – Cedar Rapids, IA @ McGrath Amphitheatre 06/26 – Indianapolis, IN @ Everwise Amphitheater 06/28 – Louisville, KY @ Iroquois Amphitheater 06/29 – Grand Rapids, MI @ 20 Monroe Live 07/16 – Wilmington, NC @ Greenfield Lake Amphitheatre 07/17 – Cary, NC @ Koka Booth Amphitheatre 07/19 – Snowshoe, WV @ 4848 Festival 07/20 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Stage AE 07/22 – Lewiston, NY @ ArtPark 07/23 – LaFayette, NY @ Beak & Skiff Apple Orchards 07/25 – Portland, ME @ Thompson’s Point 07/26 – Burlington, VT @ Waterfront Park

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The Flaming Lips Announce Spring & Summer 2024 North American Tour Dates

Cait Stoddard

[READ FULL BIO]

• New Additions

The Flaming Lips Plan 2024 Tour Dates: Ticket Presale Code & On-Sale Info

by Francesco Marano

Published february 21, 2024.

The Flaming Lips added 2024 tour dates. New shows have been announced from April into July at venues across the USA.

On tour, the band will once again be celebrating their landmark 2002 album, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots . As with previous shows and posted on the band's social media , "The Lips will be performing the album in its entirety plus a career spanning selection of some of their greatest hits and fan favorites."

The Flaming Lips Tour Dates and Tickets Near You

The flaming lips all tour dates and tickets, when do the flaming lips 2024 tour tickets go on sale and what is the presale code.

The general public on-sale begins as early as February 23. Presales for Ticketmaster, Live Nation, LN Mobile App., and local venues / radio begin February 22. Keep in mind, each date is different and details are subject to change.

The Live Nation presale password is ENERGY , and the LN Mobile App. presale code is COVERT . Click through the individual concert links for more information about the show you're interested in.

For the most up-to-date information, follow The Flaming Lips on social media and sign up for the email newsletter (bottom of page), in addition to checking your local venue's social media and email subscription service.

For more about The Flaming Lips, check out their Zumic artist page .

Steven Tyler, Aerosmith announce rescheduled farewell concert tour: New dates and ticket info

Aerosmith will be back in the saddle again this fall.

The veteran rockers, who postponed their Peace Out farewell tour after only a few shows in September, will return for a 40-date run starting Sept. 20 in Pittsburgh. The tour wraps Feb. 26, 2025 in Buffalo, NY.

The bulk of the dates are rescheduled, but the band added three cities: Pittsburgh, Orlando and Philadelphia, where their goodbye run kicked off last September.

Start the day smarter. Get all the news you need in your inbox each morning.

All previously purchased tickets will be honored for the new dates, while tickets for the new shows will go on sale at 10 a.m. local time April 12 via ticketmaster.com . For those who previously purchased tickets and cannot attend the rescheduled concerts, refunds will be available at point of purchase. A series of VIP packages are also available at aerosmith.com/VIP.

As with the original dates, The Black Crowes will open for Aerosmith.

More: Aerosmith Peace Out: See the setlist for the iconic band's farewell tour

Why did Aerosmith postpone their farewell tour?

After playing only a handful of concerts in September, the “Walk This Way” heroes had to hit pause after singer Steven Tyler damaged his vocal cords. He also fractured his larynx and was given doctor’s orders not to sing for 30 days.

But Aerosmith opted to give Tyler ample time to recuperate and scuttle all of their shows until 2024.

The wiry frontman known for his searing rock yowls, said at the time that the injury occurred at a Sept. 10 show in New York and that the vocal cord damage “led to subsequent bleeding.”

What songs can fans expect to hear at Aerosmith’s farewell shows?

USA TODAY was there for opening night of the Peace Out tour Sept. 3 in Philadelphia. As the tour is also a celebration of the band’s 50 years in the music industry, the setlist reflected their vast catalog.

The band – Tyler, guitarist Joe Perry, bassist Tom Hamilton and guitarist Brad Whitford, along with drummer John Douglas filling in for Joey Kramer – sounded in peak form for their deserved victory lap.

Songs ranged from singalong rock smashes “Livin’ on the Edge,” “Sweet Emotion” and “Rag Doll” to the rarely played album track “Adam’s Apple” and a dip into Aerosmith’s blues roots with “Hangman Jury.”

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AEROSMITH PEACE OUT 2024 TOUR DATES: 

Sept. 20 – Pittsburgh – PPG Paints Arena (NEW SHOW)*

Sept. 23 – Philadelphia  – Wells Fargo Center (NEW SHOW)

Sept. 26 – Louisville, KY – KFC Yum! Center    

Sept. 29 – Cleveland  – Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse 

Oct. 2 – Charlotte, NC – Spectrum Center

Oct. 5 – Knoxville, TN – Thompson-Boling Arena 

Oct. 8 – Washington – Capital One Arena

Oct. 11 – Atlanta – State Farm Arena

Oct. 14 – St Louis – Enterprise Center

Oct. 17 – Cincinnati  – Heritage Bank Arena

Oct. 20 – Nashville, TN  – Bridgestone Arena

Oct. 31 – Phoenix  – Footprint Center

Nov. 3 – San Antonio - Frost Bank Center

Nov. 6 – Austin, TX – Moody Center

Nov. 9 – Dallas– American Airlines Center

Nov. 12 – Tulsa, OK – BOK Center

Nov. 15 – Omaha, NE – CHI Health Center

Nov. 18 – Denver– Ball Arena    

Nov. 21 – Portland, OR – Moda Center 

Nov. 24 – Seattle – Climate Pledge Arena

Nov. 27 – Salt Lake City– Vivint Arena

Nov. 30 – San Francisco– Chase Center

Dec. 4 – San Jose, CA – SAP Center               

Dec. 7 – Los Angeles– The Kia Forum

Dec. 28 – Newark, NJ - Prudential Center 

Dec. 31 – Boston – TD Garden

Jan. 4 – Detroit - Little Caesars Arena       

Jan. 7 – Toronto – Scotiabank Arena 

Jan. 10 – Montreal – Bell Centre

Jan. 13 – Columbus, OH – Schottenstein Center  

Jan. 16 – Indianapolis – Gainbridge Fieldhouse 

Jan. 19 – Chicago – United Center

Jan. 22 – St Paul, MN – Xcel Energy Center

Jan. 25 – Kansas City, MO – T-Mobile Center

Feb. 11 – Orlando, FL – Kia Center (NEW SHOW)

Feb. 14 – Tampa, FL – Amalie Arena

Feb. 17 – Sunrise, FL – Amerant Bank Arena

Feb. 20 – Raleigh, NC – PNC Arena 

Feb. 23 – New York – Madison Square Garden

Feb. 26 – Buffalo, NY – KeyBank Center  

* Teddy Swims Joining as Special Guest, The Black Crowes not appearing

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Steven Tyler, Aerosmith announce rescheduled farewell concert tour: New dates and ticket info

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How Khruangbin’s Sound Became the New Mood Music

The Texan trio’s vibes have spawned countless imitators, but their magic isn’t so easy to replicate.

By Ryan Bradley

Ryan Bradley is a writer based in Los Angeles.

I worry that the word “vibes” is overused, but in what follows it is unavoidable: The band Khruangbin, a trio from Houston, has become so popular that there now exists an entire subgenre of music broadly known as “Khruangbin vibes.” If you have walked into a relatively hip coffee shop in a major or even minor city lately, you have probably encountered Khruangbin vibes. They’re marked by low-key, reverb-heavy, often guitar-forward instrumentals — music that’s groovy and pleasant, bewitchingly exotic yet comfortingly familiar, inoffensive and instantly graspable as existing within a particular sonic space. A vibe, as it were.

Listen to this article, read by MacLeod Andrews

Open this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.

That such music has come to have a real toehold on the culture says as much about the way music is listened to today as the sound itself. Music now exists primarily within the stream, which is to say passively: We turn it on, like a faucet, and out pour songs representing some mood, or emotion, or any of the other words we used before we had “vibes.” Perhaps it’s an aura, like “chill.” Or a vague, evocative mind-set, like “always Sunday.” The tap turns and out pour songs we already liked, along with burbles of what is a little new and different yet fits in beautifully. This is the arrangement in which “Khruangbin vibes” excel. Such music is extremely slippery, genrewise. (Is it psychedelic lounge dub? Desert surf rock? The sound you hear inside a lava lamp?) As such, it pairs well with a huge span of music, across genres and eras; it has a kind of algorithmic inevitability to it. But this slipperiness also means that quite a lot of the bands now producing Khruangbin-vibesy music are entirely forgettable.

Fortunately, being the three musicians who popularized a sound that so many others are chasing is not the same thing as chasing that sound yourself. To the members of Khruangbin — pronounced krung-bin, and featuring Laura Lee Ochoa on bass, Donald Johnson on drums and Mark Speer on guitar — that sound is not so much a goal as a result: It is what happens when they play music together. And while many others have tried, and are still trying, to identify and replicate what is so particular about Khruangbin’s sound, this is not really possible, because what happens among people when they play music together cannot really be quantified. Often, when it works, it is more — well, it’s more vibey than that.

Steve Christensen, Khruangbin’s longtime producer, explained it to me like this: Just about every day, he gets hit up on Instagram by folks asking how to achieve a particular Khruangbin sound. He responds, keeping no secrets, readily giving away everything, because Ochoa, Johnson and Speer have used pretty much the exact same setup for well over a decade now. Their gear and their instruments are simple and straightforward to the point of being borderline ascetic. (Ochoa, for example, has not changed the strings on her bass since 2010, when the group first formed.) When people write back to Christensen, which they often do, they will tell him that they now have all the same gear, and have learned all the songs perfectly, and still cannot get quite the same sound. “Well, I’m sorry,” he tells them, “but that’s just how they play.” Someone might copy Speer’s rig down to the last knob setting, and play his guitar melodies note for note, but without Ochoa and Johnson playing, too, the Khruangbin sound cannot be duplicated. “I know it sounds so simple,” Christensen says, “but if they’re not playing as a trio, it just doesn’t sound like KB.”

Questlove — the producer, documentary filmmaker, author and longtime bandleader of the Roots — is someone who has thought quite a bit about this quality in music, the ineffable alchemy that can occur when certain musicians join together. When he first saw Khruangbin, he was grabbed by not just the way they played, but also by their extreme level of togetherness. “They are so well gelled,” is how he described it. This quality, he went on, was a very rare thing, particularly in a trio. “Think of the Police,” he said. “Like, it’s so hard to do that. Musically speaking, you have to check your ego at the door and just trust that someone completely gets you.” And the Police were plagued enough by bickering to disband after about eight years — Khruangbin has, so far, been together for about 14.

After he first saw Khruangbin perform, Questlove reached out to the group. He was enamored with their sound, he told me, and wanted to find a way to help them preserve it. “They have magic — I don’t want them to ever lose that. You know what I mean?” I had to admit that, while I sort of understood, I had also never been a member of a wildly popular band: How did one lose the magic? That was easy, Questlove said: By not checking your ego. By having “one person stand like, ‘Oh, look at me, look at me.’” This was especially difficult to avoid, he said, because musicianship, like so much else these days, was increasingly focused on the individual. So how did Khruangbin gel so well, and stay well gelled?

Speer and Johnson first met in 2004, when the Houston keyboard hero Cleo Sample, who has toured with D’Angelo, pointed Speer out to Johnson, saying, “That white boy, he’s amazing.” Both musicians were gigging heavily in Houston: Johnson played in funk and jazz combos when he wasn’t playing organ in church, while Speer played with just about anyone, from ska, hip-hop and rockabilly to zydeco and R.&B. He was, Johnson says, “like a Swiss Army utility knife that can do it all.” Speer often felt as if he were the only guy in town moving among all these different scenes, and he took pride in trying to make musical connections among them. He played guitar with Solange Knowles, back when she was performing as Solo Star, and remembers asking: “Solo, have you listened to the Flaming Lips?”

Around 2006, Speer and Johnson began playing together at St. John’s Downtown Church. Its pastor at the time was Rudy Rasmus, whose love of jazz and exacting ear had long made the place a sort of Everest for local musicians. (Beyoncé grew up singing there.) Johnson put it to me simply: “Rudy knew if you sucked,” and if you sucked, you didn’t get hired. Johnson grew up with gospel, but Speer was also a wonder at it; it is, Johnson says, a type of music that is all-encompassing, containing many genres at once. It also requires a kind of egoless playing: You have to be listening intensely to the other musicians, and to on-the-fly changes from the musical director, who is locked in on the pastor, who is responding to the congregation.

After rehearsal, on Tuesday nights, the two of them would get tacos and beers at a nearby bar. One bartender had an iPod with a lot of good, obscure music from around the world — all of which Speer seemed to know about already, tracing scales and techniques from one continent to another. “He’s like a music encyclopedia,” Johnson says. In fact, Speer told me that one of the most formative musical moments in his life came when he discovered a Microsoft Encarta CD-ROM included with his parents’ new Compaq and became obsessed with its huge catalog of 30-second music samples from all corners of the globe.

One of Speer’s friends — Ochoa — eventually joined the Tuesday-night drinks. She was not a musician; she was studying art history, and would later teach math to third graders. Soon after meeting Speer, she noticed him playing his guitar along to any song that came on the radio. One day she asked him: “How do you do that?” He told her it was just a matter of following the bass, which led her to try playing one herself. “It was the first time an instrument just felt easy,” she says. Speer didn’t so much teach as guide her: “He would hear me playing, and would come over every so often, and be like, ‘Is that where that note ends?’”

Years passed, and Speer asked her to join him on a short tour, backing the electronic artist Yppah, who was opening for the British D.J. and producer Bonobo. It wasn’t just playing onstage that gave Ochoa the confidence to think about starting a band of her own; it was backstage, watching Bonobo’s camp, where she saw what music-making required “from, like, a go-getter organizational-producer-type place.” Everything around the music suddenly snapped into focus. “I love spreadsheets,” she explains — and seeing firsthand that musical success also required those skills “made being in a band feel like an attainable goal.”

She and Speer had been playing together in an old barn Speer’s family had in Burton, about 90 minutes’ drive west of Houston, in the wide-open hill country. Now she asked Johnson to join them, to start their own project. His ultratight, nearly metronomic hip-hop drumming was an ideal thread for Ochoa’s mellow, melodic bass to fold itself around — all while Speer’s guitar sang its gorgeous, worldly melodies over the top.

The magic, Ochoa says, was there from the jump. But she also knew, even after a few gigs around Houston, that they needed to get out onto the road to really grow. To do that, they needed recordings. Out at the barn, over 18 hours or so, they cut about 14 tracks. One of them, “A Calf Born in Winter,” begins with the distant sound of jingling bells — maybe sleigh bells, maybe something like the bells from Javanese gamelan music — followed by a pretty little line from what sounds like some kind of zither. Then Speer and Ochoa and Johnson make their musical entrance. The song has no chorus, no hook, no bridge, no vocals; it meanders along its own absorbing path.

Ochoa eventually got the track into the hands of Bonobo, who used it on his 2013 contribution to “LateNightTales,” a beloved series of mixtapes built on nocturnal moods. While Bonobo’s mix included far better-known artists, like Nina Simone and Bill Evans, the Khruangbin track was the standout. Here was a band no one had heard of, with an exotic name — Thai for “engine fly” or, less literally, “airplane” — and a sound that felt timeless and impossible to place. With seemingly no other tracks by them available anywhere else, it was easy to imagine the recording might have come from some long-forgotten 1970s Thai psychedelic-rock outfit, the kind of crate-digger find so popular among music nerds. That it turned out to be a trio from Houston only made them more intriguing.

Over the next two years, more tracks from that initial barn session trickled out; the three toured and toured as their audience grew and grew. They put out a full album, and another, and another, and a very good disc of dub remixes. They sold out Red Rocks in Colorado, the Greek theaters in Berkeley and Los Angeles and two nights at Radio City Music Hall. They made two EPs with a fellow Texan, Leon Bridges, one of which, “Texas Sun,” made it to the top of Billboard’s Americana/Folk Albums chart; there was also an album with Vieux Farka Touré, son of the Malian guitar god Ali Farka Touré. They recently remixed the Paul McCartney song “Pretty Boys” after he tapped them for his “McCartney III Reimagined” project. What is most noticeable, listening to their collaborations, is that the essential Khruangbin-ness of their sound is impossible to dispel — even their more famous collaborators get gathered into the band’s sonic world.

That is what has led the trio to dominate this niche in the streaming environment, as the flagship purveyor of alluring, mood-setting music that will mellow out the air in your home or boutique or TikTok video. Unlike with so many forgettable imitators, their particularities somehow refuse to stay in the background; they draw in and hold your attention. To date, Khruangbin’s albums have passed 775 million streams, a large number that still does not capture their weirdly broad appeal. Their frequent festival shows come closer: The audience for those tends to be a remarkable cross section of scenes, the E.D.M. kids and hip-hop heads rubbing shoulders with the psych-rock freaks. If the algorithms have a habit of slipping Khruangbin tracks into everyone’s ears, it’s surely because that works — they beguile across tastes.

The three of them like to joke that if they had any sense of how big they would one day be, they would have picked a name that was easier to pronounce. But even the name has added to the band’s intrigue and iconography. Same goes for the wigs Speer and Ochoa have always worn when photographed or onstage — a spur-of-the-moment choice by Ochoa, right before Khruangbin’s very first show. “I’ll be honest: It was the look and the name that grabbed me first,” David Byrne said in an email. He’d recently gone with Ochoa to see the singer-songwriter Mitski perform, and was struck by how anonymous Ochoa was when out in the world wig-free. He, like Questlove, was a big Khruangbin fan, and thought of the band as existing within a genre he called “instrumental pop,” which he then defined with a glorious list of musicians: the Serbian guitar virtuoso Branko Mataja, the benju player Ustad Noor Bakhsh, the Ethiopian jazz legend Mulatu Astatke and Santo and Johnny, best known for their 1959 steel-guitar hit “Sleep Walk.” These artists come from wildly different scenes, different eras, different continents. And yet, to the modern listener, all are similarly marked by an easy beauty, a genrelessness — a vibe.

Last month, I met with Ochoa, Johnson and Speer in Brooklyn, where Ochoa now lives. They were in town to rehearse tracks from their new album, “A La Sala,” for a new tour, their 19th. Much of their progression as a band has involved adding new layers to the stripped-down, airy sonic space they found in that barn — from vocals (sung by all three at once, though always mixed so Speer’s guitar melodies remain the focus) to the percussive, danceable sound of their last studio album, “Mordechai,” from 2020. “A La Sala,” however, goes in the other direction. It’s quieter, less busy, more like a return to the band’s earliest days in the barn in Burton — even though it was not recorded in the barn, and is, in fact, the first time they’ve made one of their own albums outside the barn.

This was a purely practical decision. When they got together to record, Ochoa was eight months pregnant, and being out in the middle of nowhere seemed like an unnecessary risk. Instead, they used Steve Christensen’s Houston studio, which is in an old warehouse: brick walls, concrete floors, train tracks nearby, a sheet-metal roof that got loud when it rained. All three members of Khruangbin become animated when talking about sound — the space around each tone, how to fill the right gaps without letting the music get crowded — but Speer is particularly obsessive. Between sessions for “A La Sala,” he would travel out to the barn with a field recorder and tape things like hand claps echoing around the space. These types of recordings can be used to create what’s called an “impulse response,” a model of the way the space reflects sound — which could then be used in the studio to make the music they were playing in the warehouse sound more open, more barnlike, more Khruangbin.

Once, out in Burton, Speer was noodling around on a little synth, and composed “Les Petits Gris,” the stripped-down track that closes the album. Throughout the recording, there is ambient noise: crickets, birdsong, creaking wood, the musicians’ hushed breaths. It feels like a direct rebuke to the idea that a band’s getting bigger and more successful has to mean getting busier, louder, more danceable.

The three now live far apart: Ochoa in Brooklyn, Speer in a tiny town north of San Francisco and Johnson in Houston. In Brooklyn, together for the first time in months, conversation turned to the upcoming tour. Speer said he wanted to spend it getting back to basics and becoming a better player. Johnson laughed: “I can’t believe Mark Speer said, ‘I want to be a better player.’” When they started, Ochoa and Speer explained, everything around them, all the different scenes of their Houston lives, contributed to their sound. But success and touring had pulled them from the environment that shaped them — something that did not help the music, because it was not what had given them their particular vibe.

What had? Speer described a wine bar in a town near his, where a group of local musicians played. He’d been eyeing it up, hoping to sit in on congas. It was this sort of exploration — being in different scenes, finding new things to try — that he wanted to return to. Johnson, when he’s home, still plays organ in his grandfather’s church. Ochoa tried to explain what Speer was driving at, what he meant by getting back to basics, by telling the story of a bad show they’d had at a huge venue. She had been pushing Speer on “being bold, and being bigger,” but he was struggling with his pedalboard. It was driving him bananas: Why did his guitar suddenly sound different? This was all the same gear he’d always used, the same stuff he’d used since the band began. Where had the magic gone?

It turned out that the stage was so big that the signal from his guitar was degrading as it ran through the very long cable required to cross it. It’s tempting to read this as a metaphor for success. But it was also the answer to the question of what made Khruangbin Khruangbin. Theirs was a sound of self-imposed limits. Not just of three of them playing, but also of the spaces between: the sounds of the barn, its birds and its crickets, the length of the guitar cable, a sense of distance, but never too much.

Ryan Bradley is a writer based in Los Angeles. He last wrote for the magazine about the L’Rain song ‘‘Find It.’’

Read by MacLeod Andrews

Narration produced by Anna Diamond and Emma Kehlbeck

Engineered by Quinton Kamara

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