Pre-order for “The Universe Smiles Upon You ii” by Khruangbin

If you could go back in time ten years, what would you want to tell yourself? This was a question Khruangbin posed to themselves when approaching the ten-year anniversary of their debut album, the once cult classic, now genre-defining work The Universe Smiles Upon You. "If we could go back and tell ourselves how much was going to happen to us after that record, what would we want to celebrate?" asked Laura Lee, bassist, vocalist, and founding member of the band. Instead, they thought: "Let's do it again." The Universe Smiles Upon You ii was recorded on January 4-6, 2025, in the same family barn of guitarist Mark Speer, across the same dates where TUSUY was first conceived ten years earlier. Though the conditions were the same-dirt floor, brutally cold, minimal sound isolation, all takes live-the songs aren't. They're re-approached, some changed more than others, harnessing the lightning-in-a-bottle energy of TUSUY while discovering what would be unique this time around, in this stage of the band's life. The result moves like ripples on the water across ten hypnotizing tracks, the barn creating a sense of spaciousness, serenity and creative freedom, nearby wildlife (listen out for the birds on "August Twelve ii"), rattles and creaks of the barn and all. It's a tapestry of small movements in nuanced arrangements, slowly revealing the new life, stories and character of someone you've met again for the first time in ten years.

EXPECTED RELEASE DATE: 12/5/25.

PRE-ORDER DISCLAIMER: Release dates are tentative and often get pushed back or cancelled by the labels. We try 100% to get you what you order, but there are times when we aren’t allotted enough of the item to fill all of the orders (and usually we won’t know this until the week of the release). In this case we will contact you as soon as we are aware that the order can’t be fulfilled. Special limited/indie exclusive releases can be ordered in multiples, but we can’t guarantee that we will be able to fill more than one copy of each said release.

Pre-orders are essentially “special orders”. This means if you place a pre-order, we are ordering it specially for you (many items we have up for pre-order are not items we carry in our store, and those that we do, we are ordering EXTRA copies to fill your pre-orders). Because of this, we cannot do cancellations or refunds after the pre-ordering time period has ended.