Over six albums, Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally of Beach House have offered the same enticement: There’s a place I want to take you; help me to name it. The implicit promise has always been that if you opened up entirely, gave enough of yourself, the nameless sensation they evoke would finally come into focus, and the shapes moving beneath the surface of their music would resolve. You would finally understand if you came closer, stayed longer, looked deeper.
You could sense the now-venerable Baltimore duo playing this game in advance of their seventh album, simply called 7. The first single, Scally noted slyly to Pitchfork, came out on February 14—2/14, or two plus one plus four equals seven. The album brought their catalog to 77 songs, and the record’s initial issue number was 777. What did all this mystical numerology amount to when you squinted at it? Nothing of course, except to set the stage, light the incense. It’s the magician’s pre-trick pantomime, where he turns up his palms and rolls up his sleeves, for no other purpose than to make you lean in closer and grin harder. “We spend a lot of time creatively making mountains out of nothingness,” Scally added.
Inducing indefinable yearnings, tracing patterns in the air—this is the essence of Beach House’s art. They usher us repeatedly into familiar territory and encourage us to notice the same things within it: the way a dim glow never surges or abates, how sensations burrow into the mind and color our memories. But with each album, they somehow render this terrain alien again, allowing us to run our hands over the same irregularities in fresh astonishment.
With 7, they’ve parted ways with longtime producer Chris Coady and teamed with Panda Bear and MGMT producer and former Spacemen 3 member Peter Kember, who goes by Sonic Boom. The result is their heaviest and most immersive-sounding album. It’s darker, thicker, set at a deeper spot in the woods. The gentle drum programming of earlier records has been swept aside for thunderous crashes: The drums on opener “Dark Spring” have the resounding weight of My Bloody Valentine’s “Only Shallow,” and the mix has a smeared, heat-sick quality that brings all of Loveless to mind. Low-end sounds, like the thrumming guitar that pierces “Dive” have real menace: The insistent thud inside “Drunk in LA” is like a hand tapping your solar plexus. This is the first Beach House record that, in headphones, will make you feel buffeted.
You are never quite sure about the size of the sounds on a Beach House song; intimate moments are massive, and vice versa. Most of the record feels recorded and mixed from a low spot gazing up, with sounds looming above, but then grass-blade details resolve themselves in the foreground. Legrand’s voice doubles on the chorus of “Pay No Mind,” transforming her from wisp to leviathan in an instant. On “Dive,” she sounds as imposing as the thumping drums, but a humming synth the size of a music box runs alongside her, confusing your sense of scale. On “L’Inconnue,” her vocal lines pan from left to right and pool in on themselves. Her breath fills every corner of space. When the track fills out—some guitars, resonant drums, a choral patch—they appear as if from inside her rib cage. She’s never sounded bigger, or less mortal, than she does here.
These perspective tricks are the tools of film-making as much as of music, and Beach House’s music is full of cuts, dissolves, fades, super-imposures. You enter their records the way you settle into a movie seat, asking to be subsumed and bathed in light. Even Legrand’s lyrics function like rapturous, lingering takes. “Rolling clouds over cement,” she sings on “Drunk in LA” Like Stevie Nicks, to whom she is often compared, or Orson Welles, to whom she is never compared, she grasps how readily we latch onto rich, intoning voices, how we can’t help but find ourselves believing in what they say. A voice like hers is its own kind of authority, and she luxuriates in the sound of words leaving her mouth.
Measuring Beach House albums against one another is tricky—how do you compare daydreams? But on a sensory level, you feel whether the spell is working, and how potent it remains. On 7, all the contrasts that mark their music are dialed up to blinding; you are plunged into darkness and then showered in light. The experience is so enveloping that you find yourself contending, once again, with that familiar itch to locate meaning. The secret at the heart of Beach House’s evocative music remains the same—there is no specific place Legrand wants to take you. But there will always be… someplace you’d rather be. Beach House will always help you dream of it.
