Driving anywhere in Texas can cost you half a day, easy. For example, it’ll take you over four
hours just to get from R&B singer Leon Bridges’ hometown of Fort Worth down to Houston,
where the psychedelic wanderers in Khruangbin hail from. The state is vast, crisscrossed with
rugged expanses of road flanked by limestone cliffs and granite mountains, forests of pine and
mesquite, miles of desert or acres of sprawling grassland, all depending on what part you’re
in. And it’s all baking under the Texas Sun that lends its name to Bridges and Khruangbin’s new
collaborative EP.
“Big sky country, that’s what they call Texas,” Khruangbin bassist Laura Lee says. “The horizon
line goes all the way from one side to another without interruption. There’s something really
comforting about that.”
On Texas Sun, these two members of the state’s musical vanguard meet up somewhere in
the middle of that scene, in the mythical nexus of Texas’ past, present, and future—a dreamy
badlands where genres blur as seamlessly as the terrain. It calls equally to the cowboys bootscooting
at Billy Bob’s in Fort Worth, the chopped-and-screwed hip-hop fans rattling slabs
on the southside of Houston, the art-school kids dropping acid in Austin, the cross-cultural
progeny who grew up on listening to both mariachi and post-hardcore out on the Mexican
borders of El Paso. All of these things, overlapping in a multicolored melange, purple hues as
vivid and unpredictable as one of the state’s rightfully celebrated sunsets.
A journey through homesick reminiscences, backseat romances, and late-night contemplations,
the kind of record made for listening with the windows down and the road humming softly
beneath you. Like the highways that inspired it, Texas Sun is guaranteed to get you where
you’re going—especially if you’re in no particular hurry to get there.
1. Texas Sun
2. Midnight
3. C-Side
4. Conversion
hours just to get from R&B singer Leon Bridges’ hometown of Fort Worth down to Houston,
where the psychedelic wanderers in Khruangbin hail from. The state is vast, crisscrossed with
rugged expanses of road flanked by limestone cliffs and granite mountains, forests of pine and
mesquite, miles of desert or acres of sprawling grassland, all depending on what part you’re
in. And it’s all baking under the Texas Sun that lends its name to Bridges and Khruangbin’s new
collaborative EP.
“Big sky country, that’s what they call Texas,” Khruangbin bassist Laura Lee says. “The horizon
line goes all the way from one side to another without interruption. There’s something really
comforting about that.”
On Texas Sun, these two members of the state’s musical vanguard meet up somewhere in
the middle of that scene, in the mythical nexus of Texas’ past, present, and future—a dreamy
badlands where genres blur as seamlessly as the terrain. It calls equally to the cowboys bootscooting
at Billy Bob’s in Fort Worth, the chopped-and-screwed hip-hop fans rattling slabs
on the southside of Houston, the art-school kids dropping acid in Austin, the cross-cultural
progeny who grew up on listening to both mariachi and post-hardcore out on the Mexican
borders of El Paso. All of these things, overlapping in a multicolored melange, purple hues as
vivid and unpredictable as one of the state’s rightfully celebrated sunsets.
A journey through homesick reminiscences, backseat romances, and late-night contemplations,
the kind of record made for listening with the windows down and the road humming softly
beneath you. Like the highways that inspired it, Texas Sun is guaranteed to get you where
you’re going—especially if you’re in no particular hurry to get there.
1. Texas Sun
2. Midnight
3. C-Side
4. Conversion