Khun Narin Electric Phin Band had been playing phin prayuk in Phetchabun long before a phone-filmed clip of them parading through a remote village, captioned “mindblowing psychedelia from Thailand”, went viral and pulled Western listeners toward a sound they had never heard named.

That clip is how most people outside Thailand first met the group, and six months later Los Angeles producer Josh Marcy had tracked them down through Facebook messages translated by staff at his local Thai restaurant, flown out to meet them, and recorded them outdoors in a field near Lom Sak, letting the surrounding mountains handle the reverb. “Sut Sanaen #2” is a four-minute cut from those sessions, and it remains the sharpest distillation of what the viral clip was actually capturing.

Phin prayuk is a village-celebration style built around the electrified three-stringed phin lute and paraded through communities during morning rituals and temple processions. Lead player Sitthichai “Beer” Charoenkhwan hand-carves his own phins from local hardwood, crowns the headstocks with Naga serpents, installs Fender pickups, and runs the signal through a PH-3 phase shifter, a DS-1 distortion, and a DD-7 digital delay. The result is a swirling, motorik drive pulled from a centuries-old Isan melody that is often the first a phin or khaen student learns.

The track also carries the physical weight of the group’s custom sound tower, a mobile rig of eight loudspeaker horns stacked on a bass cabinet and powered by a petrol generator. That rig lets the rhythm section, bassist Chaiphichit Taraphan and drummer Wanlop Saengarun, drive the groove for hours during a typical engagement.

“Sut Sanaen #2” now arrives as the calling card ahead of III, the band’s first studio album, due in May on Innovative Leisure under producer Tommy Brenneck of The Budos Band.

Stream and pre-order III HERE