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 feel—instinctual, 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, 2016’s Calico Review, was a cinematic exploration of their hometown of Los Angeles, while their sophomore effort for the label, 2019’s LAHS, saw them looking farther abroad, turning their gaze outward and transmitting sound from a place not found on any map. It’s 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 the foundation 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.

Sirenas is also an album very much informed by some more distant heroes—figures and bands that have subconsciously guided the quartet throughout the past 15 years. The music pulls from a wide range of influences loosely based in a dreamy afterimage of the 80s and 90s, from the melodic pop of FELT and Laidback, to the celestial ambience of Akira Ito and Popul Vuh, and the electronic funk of Ultramarine (who get their own special shout out in the tracklist).

At once boundless and intimate, Sirenas opens a new passage in the Allah-Las catalog. It’s an album built from exchange and the potent energy that emerges when musicians allow themselves to disappear completely inside the sound. This is music less concerned with arrival than with the journey itself, and sends out a signal that will keep on reverberating into even more distant horizons.