Khruangbin — Con Todo El Mundo (2018)
A warm, borderless album that glides across cultures — and shows how Khruangbin turned global listening into a quiet new mood for cities everywhere.
By Rafi Mercer
There are albums that stay in their lane, and there are albums that behave like travellers — absorbing places, carrying textures, moving quietly across borders. Con Todo El Mundo is the latter. A record shaped by Houston heat, yes, but also by Thai funk, Persian melodies, surf-soul laziness, and a kind of borderless curiosity that feels like someone pressing their ear to the world just to see what comes back. It’s an album made by a band who listen widely, then stitch the echoes together with a gentleness that makes the unfamiliar feel instantly intimate.
The first thing you notice is the stillness. Khruangbin don’t push; they glide. Laura Lee’s bass lines don’t walk so much as hover. Mark Speer’s guitar plays like sunlight moving off water. Donald Johnson’s drums leave space rather than fill it. Everything here is warm, unhurried, unforced — music that seems to take its time crossing the room, as if to say: this is the pace at which things become meaningful.
And yet beneath that calm surface is something quietly radical: the refusal to belong to any one city or style. This is the sound of listening across continents, of letting one influence bleed into another, of treating genres like ingredients instead of destinations. The band have always said that Khruangbin is built on listening first, playing second — and that is exactly how the album moves. You hear the way they’ve absorbed Thai 60s grooves, Iranian pop, Californian surf, Nigerian highlife. Nothing is copied; everything is translated through feel.
Con Todo El Mundo arrived at the right moment too. A moment when cities were beginning to rethink what intimacy in public could sound like. When listening bars were spreading beyond Japan and people were looking for music that didn’t demand attention by force, but earned it by atmosphere. The album entered that world like a soft instruction manual: slow down, notice more, leave room for detail. It’s no surprise it became a staple in listening rooms from Brooklyn to Berlin.
What fascinates me is how this record travels. It behaves like a memory people carry from one city to another — someone hears it in Lisbon and brings it back to Manchester. Someone first encounters it in a bar in Seoul and returns home wanting to build a room that feels like that night. Khruangbin didn’t just make a great album; they made a portable mood, a passport for ambience. The kind of thing that slips quietly into a culture and changes it from the inside.
And perhaps that’s why the album still feels alive years later. It’s not trying to capture a moment. It’s trying to create one — the feeling of warm air, low light, and the gentle understanding that listening is a form of travel too. You don’t need to move physically; the music does the moving for you. You just follow.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or click here to read more.
