Maria También

The band told NPR it was the first song they wrote for Con Todo El Mundo, and that it draws on Iranian music from before the revolution. Its breakbeat comes from Apache: Speer had once run sound at a Houston youth center where breakdancers taught kids to b-boy. Johnson said they wanted the booming energy of the outdoor festivals they had started to play, with the kick drum louder in the mix to get people dancing. Like the rest of the album it was tracked live in the Burton barn with Steve Christensen. It came out as the lead single on 2 November 2017, the day the band's signing to Dead Oceans was announced.

Stereogum's Peter Helman called it an Eastern-influenced groove. Bandcamp Daily's Max Savage Levenson heard Run-DMC's Peter Piper in the breakdown. GRAMMY.com's Ana Monroy Yglesias heard vintage surf rock and a bassline faintly recalling the Surfaris' Wipe Out, picked out the handclaps, bells and sly yeahs, and counted it among their most urgent tunes.

Video

From a concept by Sanam Petri and Laura Lee, the video was directed by Chris Boyle and produced by Helen Power at Private Island. Built from archival footage, it tells the story of Iranian women before the 1979 revolution. The band said it celebrates their creativity, their freedom and their self-expression, and that the women shown belong to a wide network of artists, singers, dancers and songwriters exiled or silenced since.

Live

setlist.fm logs 346 performances, second only to People Everywhere (Still Alive) in their catalogue, and it is the Khruangbin song other artists cover most often on stage. It opened their NPR Tiny Desk Concert and their KEXP session in spring 2018, and the KEXP take was released on Live at KEXP, Volume 10. It also appears on Live at Lincoln Hall, Live at The Fillmore Miami and Live at Sydney Opera House. In 2019 the band remade it as the dub Mary Always to announce Hasta El Cielo. The upload in the hypersongs web is the official video for the single.