Beach House

An immaculate combination of gauzy atmospheres, simple pop melodies and Victoria Legrand’s velvet-smooth vocals helped Beach House define the sound of 21st-century dream pop. The Paris-born Legrand and her bandmate Alex Scally met in 2004 in Baltimore, and the ease at which they fell into their sonic collaboration led her to refer to Scally as her “musical soulmate”. In 2006, Beach House landed “Apple Orchard”—a swooping, melancholy track dense with organ—on a popular digital mixtape, setting up a warm reception for its debut self-titled album. Beach House is a blossoming mix of gentle shoegaze and soft psychedelia with melodies that float hazily above glowing instrumentation. Following the release of 2008’s Devotion, boasting fuller arrangements and more complex hooks, the duo signed to Sub Pop. With 2010’s Teen Dream, the pair played with slightly wilder dynamics, like the splashy crescendo of “Zebra” and the soaring “Take Care”. Ever since, Beach House’s ethereal, reverb-soaked sound has had a notable influence on not just indie music but also mainstream pop and rap (the band’s been sampled by the likes of The Weeknd, Kendrick Lamar and The Chainsmokers). Meanwhile, the duo has continued to build on its own sonic foundations, with the galactic bedroom pop of 2015’s “Space Song” and the dark bliss of 2018’s 7. Legrand and Scally have even recast the traditional album drop, releasing 2022’s majestic Once Twice Melody in four separate chapters. “We utilised a lot more of our imaginations and our editing,” Legrand told Apple Music. “It didn’t just feel like another album of ours; it felt like a larger, newer kind of way of looking at our music—cinematic, literary.” Despite consistent experimentation with form and approach, Beach House remains consistently hypnotic and perpetually transportive.