Beach House

Beach House, the project of Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally, centers on the entrancing exchange between Legrand’s smooth vocals and keyboard textures and Scally’s flowing guitar lines. Across successive releases the pair shifted away from the unpretentious four-track intimacy of their 2006 self-titled debut toward the expansive grandeur heard on 2012’s Bloom. Later works broadened the palette further, weaving psychedelic and electronic elements into the atmospheric dream pop of 2018’s 7 while 2022’s Once Twice Melody and its 2023 companion EP Become added sweeping string arrangements and warmer acoustic hues. With nearly every album the duo continued to expand the boundaries of the genre.

Legrand and Scally first connected within Baltimore’s independent music community and established Beach House in 2004. Songs began appearing soon afterward, among them “Apple Orchard,” which Pitchfork included in its Infinite Mixtape MP3 series in August 2006. That October Carpark issued the hazy self-titled debut, captured by the duo on a four-track recorder in Scally’s basement; the record drew positive notices and drew parallels to Nico and Mazzy Star. Early in 2007 the pair commenced work on a follow-up, composing material that they tracked at Lord Baltimore Recording Studio in a matter of weeks. Issued in February 2008, Devotion offered a marginally clearer iteration of their established approach and became the first Beach House album to register on the Billboard 200 Albums chart, where it reached number 195. In 2009 the duo supplied a cover of Queen’s “Play the Game” to the iTunes edition of the Red Hot Organization’s Dark Was the Night compilation, while Legrand added vocals to Grizzly Bear’s “Two Weeks.”

After an extended tour supporting Devotion, Legrand and Scally enlisted producer Chris Coady for their Sub Pop debut, Teen Dream. Released in January 2010, the album further refined their signature sound, entering the upper half of the Billboard 200 and marking their initial appearance on the U.K. charts. Building on that momentum, May 2012’s Bloom was conceived as a cohesive listening experience rather than a sequence of discrete tracks. Recorded once more with Coady at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, the fourth album stood as their most refined effort to date, earning broad critical praise and debuting at number seven on the Billboard 200. In 2013 Beach House issued the short concert film Forever Still, captured in the vicinity of the Bloom sessions.

Two years later the duo returned with a pair of albums co-produced by Coady that revisited the sparer aesthetic of their earliest recordings. Depression Cherry, tracked in August 2015 at Studio in the Country in Bogalusa, Louisiana, featured a twenty-four-voice choir on one track and, like Bloom, reached the Top Ten in the United States while performing strongly across Europe. That October the darker, more restrained Thank Your Lucky Stars followed, peaking at number 39 on the U.S. chart. June 2017 brought the compilation B-Sides and Rarities, which collected fourteen tracks including the previously unheard “Chariot” and “Baseball Diamond.” For their seventh album the band adopted a fresh working method, entering the studio with Sonic Boom and drummer James Barone to capture material immediately upon completion. The resulting 2018 release, titled 7, ranged from sleek electronic pop to acoustic instrumentation and climbed to number 20 on the Billboard 200 Albums chart.

Beach House opened the new decade with two scoring endeavors, first creating music for trailers at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and later composing for the short film Marin’s Dreams and the Meow Wolf interactive installation Omega Mart. November 2021 saw the initial installment of the eighth album Once Twice Melody, whose subsequent chapters culminated in the February 2022 physical edition. Produced by Scally and Legrand, the double album incorporated string arrangements by David Campbell and traversed electro-inflected dream pop to folk-tinged passages; it received widespread acclaim, reaching number 12 on the Billboard 200 and number 65 on the U.K. Albums Chart. Their score for Sofia Alvarez’s film adaptation of Sarah Dessen’s Along for the Ride surfaced in March 2022, after which the band toured extensively. An EP of unreleased Once Twice Melody outtakes titled Become appeared as a limited Record Store Day vinyl in April 2023 before becoming available on streaming platforms later that month.