Leon Bridges

Gold-Diggers Sound is the new album from Leon Bridges. This R&B collection is birthed from extended late nights at the Los Angeles, California studio of the same name. The album celebrates Leon’s immersive experience of creating music in the same East Hollywood room where he lived, worked, and drank over the course of two years. The soulful collaboration between Leon as an artist and the space itself was so encompassing that he chose to name the album after the soon-to-be legendary complex.

Texas connection aside (Bridges is from Fort Worth, Khruangbin from Houston), Leon Bridges and Khruangbin make a natural pair: Bridges, the throwback soul man who brings R&B’s past into vivid focus, and Khruangbin, a one-band jukebox whose encyclopedic sense of groove has made them one of the more sneakily pleasurable artists of the 2010s. A companion to 2020 collaboration Texas Sun, Texas Moon is, first and foremost, a mood: dusky, mellow, warm, windows down. The artists can take on Philly soul with a psychedelic slant (“Doris”), mix disco with West African juju (“B-Side”), and play country cadences with ambient, indie-rock warmth (“Mariella”), all with an effortlessness that would make their melting pot state proud.

On paper, it’s an unlikely pairing: Leon Bridges, classic soul revivalist and late-’50s throwback, cutting a record with Khruangbin, forward-leaning, genre-allergic instrumental trio. But before they’d ever met—at the first in a slew of tour dates they’d play together in late 2018—Bridges had been writing to the sound of Khruangbin’s breakthrough LP Con Todo El Mundo. “I really love their kind of minimalist approach to instrumentation, just like the style of it,” Bridges tells Apple Music. “It’s very soulful.” The attraction was mutual. As the tour unfolded, Khruangbin approached Bridges with new music that seemed to call out for a vocal—a recording they’d given the working title “Awesome Guitar Loop.” “We sent it to him and then literally the next day he came back with words on it,” bassist Laura Lee says. “That was the beginning.”