Ten years ago, a Houston trio with the intriguing moniker Khruangbin released its debut album, The Universe Smiles Upon You. Yesterday, the band surprise-dropped a sequel of sorts — A remake? A revisitation? — titled The Universe Smiles Upon You ii. It’s a full-circle return, and also a marker of how incredibly far the band has come. To wit: that 2015 debut has racked up more than half a billion streams on Spotify, and four subsequent Khruangbin albums have done brisk numbers as well.
I recently connected with the band — bassist Laura Lee Ochoa, guitarist Mark Speer, drummer Donald Johnson, better known as DJ — to talk about their reasons for remaking The Universe Smiles Upon You, and the challenges inherent in that process. We reflected on the secret sauce in the Khruangbin formula. I asked them about the influence of D’Angelo and his album Voodoo, which I hear lurking in their sound. And we talked about their relationship to jazz, which is more than incidental (though none of them would ever claim to be a jazz musician).
We connected over Zoom, from four different locales. I was struck by how open and generous these musicians are in conversation, and how much care they put into the conditions around their music. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did.
