On Tuesday, September 24th, 2024, Khruangbin performed the second of their two sold-out appearances at The Anthem in Washington, DC.

Before the ethereal bliss of Khruangbin began, Arooj Aftab stepped onto the stage with sunglasses, her figure framed by delicate light as if she were emerging from the mist of some ancient dream. The crowd is hushed, held in the tender grip of anticipation. It is as though everyone knows they are about to witness something more than just music—something ineffable, like the whispers of a language forgotten by time with the sounds of a Pakistani and world music-inspired jazz performance. What makes Aftab's music so powerful is its restraint. She does not rush. She does not bend to the urgency of the modern world. Her songs unfold slowly, deliberately, like petals of a flower that refuse to bloom until they are ready. And with each passing minute of her forty-five minute performance, the crowd cheered and celebrated her performance.

At 9:15 PM, Khruangbin emerged onto the stage like mythic figures descending from the heavens, draped in shimmering light, their silhouettes ephemeral beneath a Salvador Dalí landscape of color. The stage is awash with fluid, melting shapes—brilliant hues of orange, violet, and cerulean swirl in slow motion, stretching across the room like a canvas bending to time. Their music floats as if it's been dipped in surrealist paint, every note dripping from the sky, thick and cloudlike.

As the first notes of "Fifteen Fifty‐Three" fill the air, we are lifted, drawn upwards into this otherworldly scene, a dreamscape of melting clocks and endless skies. The colors bleed into one another, transforming the venue into a surreal desert of sound, where space and time twist and dissolve as Laura Lee and Mark Speer took their place in the window frames at the back of the stage. Khruangbin's melodies poured out like liquid light as Lee and Speer slowly floated in the cloudlike stage - delicately drifting and rotating through the glistening expanse of the stage. For the first set, Khruangbin played the entirety of  A LA SALA's twelve tracks from "Fifteen Fifty‐Three"  to "Les Petits Gris." The lights danced across the crowd in long, sinewy lines, warping and shifting with every beat, and the audience was no longer bound by gravity as if walking on air above a Salvadorian desert where the mountains are liquid, and the sky is an open ocean of shimmering gold.

Set two unfolded like a further descent into this bizarre, mesmerizing world.  As the opening chords of "The Number 4" ring out, the lights again stretch across the room, transforming into a sea of warm, melted tones.  At the same time "August Twelve" and "August 10th" felt like watching colors drip slowly down the walls, their steady grooves bending time, pulling us deeper into the surreal. By the time "Pelota" begins, the space feels like a Dalí painting in motion—shapes and sounds blending into one another with dreamlike ease, the music floating above us like the brushstrokes of an artist shaping our reality.

The encore would be a dazzling crescendo for this two-night run - a final foray into the surreal cloudscape vision. "Mr. White" unfolds like a sequence of shimmering, golden sands, the melody gliding like a mirage across the horizon. "Time (You and I)" plays like a reminder that even in this elastic world of sound and color, the moment is fleeting. And as the final chords of "People Everywhere (Still Alive)" drift into the ether, the Anthem is left glowing, a canvas washed with surreal, shimmering light.  

Khruangbin pulled us into their dream, a Salvador Dalí dreamscape where music and light have fused into a single, endless cloud of music, light, and incredible music.