Saigon Soul Revival Return With a New Album, and Brotha Lok Takes It to the Club

"Vỡ Mộng Ân Tình," a five-year-old Saigon Soul Revival ballad, spent part of this year soundtracking the James Bond video game "007 First Light." That's not the kind of credit a nostalgia act picks up by accident, and it tells you something about where this Ho Chi Minh City band has landed. On September 11, they prove it again: a new album called Chốn Ta Về, "The Place We Return To," and a lead single that producer Brotha Lok is about to drag onto the region's dancefloors.

A Homecoming, on Purpose

Chốn Ta Về is 11 tracks, fully analog, recorded October 20 to November 24, 2025 at In The Box Studios in Saigon with engineer Benjamin James and producer Jan Hagenkötter. Singer Nguyễn Anh Minh has described it in press materials as a journey of finding one's way home through love, loss and self-discovery, which is a lot to hang on a record, but the band has form: since 2016 they've built their whole catalog around reviving nhạc vàng, literally "golden music," the pre-1975 Saigon pop and soul that a lot of Vietnam's own record industry spent decades trying to forget existed.

The new record leans further into that heritage than anything they've released before, adding the T'rung (a bamboo tube xylophone) and the Sáo Trúc flute to the band's usual guitar-and-organ soul arrangements. Jazz saxophonist Trần Mạnh Tuấn, one of the most recognizable names in Vietnamese jazz, guests on closer "Ơ Kìa, Em Ơi!" alongside multi-instrumentalist Đinh Nhật Minh.

Lead single "Trúc Xinh" is where the album's ambitions are easiest to hear: đàn tranh player Nguyễn Thị Hải Phượng and đàn nguyệt player Indy Jeremy Vinh Laville trade lines against a rhythm section built for a soul revue, with three backing vocalists stacked behind Minh's lead. It's a four-minute-fifteen argument that a 1960s instrument and a modern groove were never really in conflict.

Brotha Lok Takes It to the Floor

Here's the part that matters for anyone who doesn't own a turntable: Mixmag Asia's 2026 essential-listening roundup already flagged a "Trúc Xinh (Brotha Lok Remix Instrumental)" among the region's records worth hearing. Brotha Lok, a Saigon-based producer on the same Saigon Supersound roster, isn't new to this pairing. He turned the band's 2022 single "Hào Hoa" into an extended club version and a radio edit, both built to move a room rather than sit on a shelf, and the Trúc Xinh treatment looks to follow the same brief. Saigon Supersound hasn't published a standalone release date or streaming link for the remix yet, so treat it as confirmed-but-not-yet-dropped rather than out now.

Bigger Than a Local Revival Act

What started as a bar-band tribute to pre-1975 Saigon has since toured Australia, China and Europe, played Manchester's Band on the Wall, and landed the single "Ai Thật Lòng Yêu Ai" in the permanent exhibition at the Philharmonie de Paris. The band's own line for all of it is "Global Pop, rooted in Vietnamese culture," which sounds like a pitch deck until you hear how naturally the đàn tranh sits next to a bassline built for a soul club. It's the same instinct that's sent other Southeast Asian records outward this year, from Yogyakarta's RAMPAK G bending Durban gqom into an Indonesian shape to whatever's coming out of the clubs documented in our Ho Chi Minh City nightlife guide.

If You Want In

Chốn Ta Về is out September 11 on Saigon Supersound, streaming and digital via Bandcamp, with a vinyl edition (SKU SSS21-1) already listed at UK dealer Coldcut Hot Wax for £24.99. No confirmed date yet for the Brotha Lok remix or a wider tour to support the album, both worth watching Saigon Supersound's own channels for.

Cover photo and album artwork courtesy of Saigon Supersound.