Allah-Las

Allah-Las make music that resists easy placement. Since forming in Los Angeles in 2008, the band has steadily sidestepped trends, creating a sound rooted not in nostalgia, but in feelinstinctual, atmospheric, and often instrumental in its storytelling, even when words are present. Their records suggest a band uninterested in spectacle, and focused instead on tone, pacing, and space. The easy friendship that blossomed when three of the four band members were working at Amoeba Music has evolved into a lauded body of work grounded in storytelling and discovery. Their first album for Mexican Summer, 2016s Calico Review, was a cinematic exploration of their hometown of Los Angeles, while their sophomore effort for the label, 2019s LAHS, saw them looking farther abroad, turning their gaze outward and transmitting sound from a place not found on any map. Its a similar fascination with vast listening, inner and outer traveling, and collective imagining that steers Sirenas, their first fully instrumental expression. Rather than looking to their environment or farther abroad beyond the horizon, Sirenas finds the band directing their gaze deeply within to shape songs through intuition and feeling rather than any set concept. Ideas of unseen frequencies and interdimensional transmissions laid thefoundation for the music, drawing from the spiritual and cosmic philosophies of visionaries such as Iasos and Brian Eno, both of whom framed both creativity and composition as a deeply receptive state.Riding these psychic waves, the band approached the recording process without any defined concept or destination, instead creating space to jam, to ramble, and to follow any and every impulse, no matter how strange it seemed or where it led. The sessions embraced detours and drift, altered recording approaches, and looser songwriting structures. Ideas were captured instinctively, without overthinking whether they aligned with their previous work. This same desire also saw the band expanding its palette in the studio, introducing new instrumentation and textures, including flute from California-based musician Clay Finch of Mapache, that pushed their sound in unexpected directions.