An hour into our conversation, Victoria Legrand names the feeling. “We’re kids pretending to be grown ups.” Alex Scally, Beach House’s other half, is cruising along two beers in, shoes off and cozied up on a velvet sectional in a suite overlooking the water, at what may be Baltimore’s bougiest hotel, the Pendry. He thinks the room itself amplifies the “playing adult” vibe, and it’s true: The mildly stuffy furnishings and dearth of proper lighting, mixed with a rainy evening, lends a seriousness to the moment that is sharply undercut by the personalities on display tonight.
The duo brought a bottle of mezcal, a bouquet of flowers, and three shot glasses to the interview. As Legrand sips a baby shot, she keeps imagining that this is the first alcohol any of us have ever imbibed. Scally soon turns the three-foot-long, spaceship-like coffee table into a narrow fort. We eye the knick-knacks on the shelves—vases out of Restoration Hardware by way of the Met’s antiquities collection—with suspicion and tuck into a tray of caramel-filled chocolates atop a bed of crushed ice-cream cones. It arrived from the hotel with a sweet note (“Thank you both for everything you have done and continue to do”) and a $100 credit, which had already been spent on minibar tequila.
They spiral into extended riffs on waterbeds (free band name: Heavy Pagan Waterbed), bushes (not the plants), fake apps for rescuing bunny rabbits (call it “Poof”), Damon Albarn vs. Taylor Swift (“Everybody fucking leave her alone”), the Oasis cover band that played for three days (legends, all of them), the demise of cursive handwriting (absolutely tragic), and the hazards of shag carpeting (“Imagine dropping chili in the shag”). At the end of a thought, Legrand says things like, “I’m an intense motherfucker. I got a leather jacket on and I love flowers, so go fuck yourself,” joking but entirely serious too.
If the members of Beach House seem in rare form, it’s at least in part because they’ve been cooped up. With their first tour in three years starting soon, they are COVID-testing constantly and avoiding the bars, where Scally would very much like to be tonight. They spent the pandemic in Baltimore, their longtime home base, with Legrand at times shuttling to Philadelphia to care for her mother. The singer and keyboardist took up birdwatching “to lower her blood pressure,” and her humble favorites include doves, chickadees, cardinals, and mockingbirds. Scally’s hobbies, on the other hand, were less calming. “Aside from the normal quotidian upkeep of books, movies, and exercise,” he says, “I was completely consumed the entire time, almost to the point of insanity, by the record.”
He’s talking about Once Twice Melody, the self-produced, four-chapter odyssey that covers more sonic and thematic ground than any Beach House album that came before it—from the jubilant French pop of the title track to the post-punk throb of “Superstar,” the neon M83 glow radiating from “Finale” to that juicy slide guitar bleating out of “The Bells.” Scally essentially taught himself how to be an engineer in order to record the album, with the bulk of it coming together at his home studio. “There’s always been that scrappy part of us that just wants to get it done quickly for the sake of capturing that thing,” says Legrand. They play me an old iPhone video of “Masquerade,” the album’s clubbiest track, being written on an early-’90s keyboard called a Rapman, just a built-in beat and Legrand’s chords evoking a labyrinth of darkness.
When it came to figuring out their at-home process, the recording of Legrand’s vocals, over a five-month period ending in the punishing COVID winter of 2021, was particularly challenging and intimate. “It was just Vic and I, me being the one recording and editing,” Scally says. “It was like a steel cage death match.” After recording drums and strings in L.A. and finishing the record on a high note, the band got word that, due to supply-chain issues and vinyl production, they’d need to rush to get everything done in time if there was any hope of it coming out in 2022. So began their mixing scramble, wherein four different mixers—including the alternative legend Alan Moulder (My Bloody Valentine, NIN)—worked remotely on Once Twice Melody’s 18 songs. “It was on all accounts so hard and made us fight constantly for the record,” says Scally.
Since their start in the mid-2000s, Beach House have maintained a certain level of mystery. Little is known about their origins or their personal relationship, and the music’s signature wash of blissed-out guitar reverb, vintage organ tones, and Legrand’s sensuous voice became a kind of universal astral projection in the vast vibescape of online music culture. Besides Tame Impala, they are perhaps the only current band that has been both sampled by one of the greatest rappers of our time and immortalized by some of the worst EDM bros. Theirs is a slow evolution, and a consistent one. Eight albums later, they have come to define modern dream pop by merging elements of psychedelia, shoegaze, and dub with the indelible whine of George Harrison’s guitar, the hint of danger in Warhol’s Factory, and the eternal cool of their arthouse influences.
Beach House make soundtracks for movies that don’t exist. Maybe that’s why there are 150,000 TikToks set to clips of “Space Song,” from 2015’s Depression Cherry, many of them unattached to a specific meme but involving similar themes: crying, a false sense of profundity, feeling small in a big world. Somewhere along the way, “Space Song” racked up 343 million Spotify streams, and Beach House emerged as one of the most influential 2000s indie rock bands still going.
Now Scally is unsure where they should put “Space Song” in the setlist for the Once Twice Melody tour. Over takeout shrimp cocktail, calamari, sandwiches, and fries, he plays out the scenarios—first third or encore?—until Legrand announces that we don’t need to talk about it anymore. While she can muse endlessly about creative concerns, she’s less interested in conversations about streaming and “the industry,” and sometimes loses her patience with Scally’s curiosity (or “hypothetical blabbing,” as he calls it) about such topics. It feels like catching a glimpse of the perpetual push and pull dynamic that makes Beach House work. They are an organism with two distinct halves—Alex is the analytical one, Vic more romantic and freeform. It’s hard to imagine one without the other.
“I am not joking when I say that so much of my life is this band,” Legrand tells me while Scally is out of the room. “I have my times alone and my little excursions and my friends, but the globe and the turning point is the art of the band. It is a relationship, but I can’t describe it like I would describe friends of mine’s relationships. I’ve read about it in books and I’ve seen it in movies, and tears have come to my eyes. I will choose art, ideas, fantasy, excitement, dreams, and films any day over some mundane thing.” In the same stretch of thought she says, “I just know for myself, for my particular pack, I’m living a non-traditional life and not because I actively chose. I have always followed the breadcrumbs of the fairy that is leading me down my path.”
Several hours later, after the lethargy of fried food and booze sets in, and the conversation turns heavy, Scally can sense the mood in the room has shifted beyond innocent loopiness. “Something else is happening, but I can’t quite place it—what is it?” he asks Legrand, noting her preeminence in naming a feeling. Sitting on the floor, she thinks for a second and launches into a moment of abstraction. “The kids are laying around going, ‘I like this girl, I don’t know. What’s life? What’s the meaning of life?’” Even now, after nearly 20 years of making music together, they’re still asking each other the big questions.
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Alex Scally: We sent this record to a friend, and his reaction was like, “This is great, but…”
Victoria Legrand: “... I would edit half of it out.” Which is semi-offensive.
AS: “... and just keep the best stuff.” My immediate thought was like, You’re right. That’s what we thought at first too. But as we’ve released these chapters and the energy has fallen back to us, it’s proven our point, which is that they’re all facets of this big thing. If we had just cut it down to an essentialized version, it wouldn’t have worked. It needed the deep-cut boredom level.
Not saying we’re like these bands, but it’s like Tusk or The White Album or that ELO double record. There’s a real joy in the expanse. Songs in the Key of Life by Stevie Wonder is one of my favorite records, but a lot of my favorite songs are not the big ones—I don’t love it for “I Wish” or “Sir Duke.” Would “Dear Prudence” have made the top 10 cut of The White Album? I don’t know, but it’s my favorite fucking Beatles song of all time.
That was the spirit, and the world is against that right now. Nobody has any attention span, and we knew that. This was just the record that had to come out for us artistically.
VL: I mean, we’re forever changed by a record, always. I don’t know exactly how this record has changed us yet. I can’t tell if it will be, like, we never make another one again, or if we’ll need three to six people in the room with us at all times, or if Alex needs to be in this room by himself and then I come in at this exact moment. I don’t know how to behave for the future. I can’t tell if this is just the gateway drug. I can’t tell if, eight albums in, we’re just beginning. Honestly, I’m scared because I feel like that might be the case.
AS: Because you can’t take any more records?
VL: No. I’m scared that we’ve just been warming up. I’m frightened that the next record will just be like two 45-minute songs, but each song is like 5,000 chapters.
AS: I get the sense, because a huge part of our life has always been reacting to stuff, that the next thing we make—if we ever make something again—is going to be concise and tight and small.
VL: I’ll do tight and small, then I’m going to do super big. Gemini baby, both sides. This album isn’t even out, so I don’t know. But I’m being very honest. It could be the end…
AS: We just don’t know what’s going on.
VL: I, personally, want to bring more chaos into the music. With this album, we really got a taste.
AS: It’s not chaos.
VL: No, but we got a taste. If we’d ever wondered what it was really going to be like with only you and me in the studio, we got a taste of that, hardcore. It’s like, if you climb a mountain, are you going to climb more scary mountains? I think you might, unless you actually fall and really hurt yourself.
AS: Victoria has a much more beautiful, open view of reality, while I tend to think of things in terms of structure. Basically, I think that Beach House has to make at least three more records. These are what I think those records are.
VL: Whoa, whoa, whoa there, buddy. We’ve talked about this, but I wasn’t prepared.
AS: This is my dream as one half of the band. I think we need to make an extremely minimal record, where it’s just one or two sounds and a voice. Chords and melody only, and you take everything else away.
VL: Me gasping for air.
AS: Then, we need to make an extreme dance record. I mean like maximal, super high-energy beat world.
VL: With possibly no lyrics, just vocal things happening. I’ve always wanted to do that, since before Beach House started.
AS: Then, a covers album, where you’re taking beautiful songs you’ve loved in the past and re-imagining them. There’s so many songs we love that aren’t pop songs.
So those are three unanswered artistic dreams. Who knows if we’ll ever get to them. Of course, once you imagine something, it is never going to be like that. If we made a dance record, nobody would be dancing to it.
VL: We’ll call the record Nobody Dances.
VL: It’s like this comet that’s doing its own thing, that’s super fun and ridiculous. It’s also beyond our ability to control or understand, and that is relaxing to me. I am definitely a child of chaos, and something that calms me is understanding that there’s beauty in chaos, but you have to let go. I have never tried to understand “Space Song” and I don’t want to. You respect it and you leave it alone.
I don’t need to analyze it because I’m grateful for it. I don’t think it’s just that song, but if that is the gateway, then I’m happy about it. We both feel lucky that younger people keep discovering us and we’re able to keep making records. Like, what did we do in a past life? It just could be so different. We could have drowned. We could have disappeared.
AS: The slowed and reverb thing is really funny, because we’re already slowed and reverbed. That was a funny discovery: We go on YouTube one day and here’s all of our songs, slowed and reverbed. And some of them have millions of plays. People are flocking to this. At the same, I understand it because the world is fast and chaotic. You just want things to be mellow and slow and give you time to experience them.
VL: I want that for myself. I want to be like young people. I want to take time and just get lost for hours.
AS: I can go first because it’s easy. I feel that way on many new songs. But I also feel that way a lot, because I’m generally in awe of Victoria’s creative spirit and lyricism. A perpetual feeling, to be honest. We have very different skills.
VL: Yeah. But under pressure, we are both fighters. I’m in awe of the fact that we keep making things. Usually in any relationship, best friends or a band or anything, somebody always kaputs. Somebody’s just like, “I can’t do this anymore. This is too much for me.” This band is like two juggernauts, and we just keep surviving.
AS: Just two cretins banging each other with huge fists.
VL: No, just banging through dreams. And I do think that if somebody can still surprise you, that’s good. When the surprises stop completely, then something’s drying up. Even yesterday, we were rehearsing in our space, and Alex did some new thing at the end of “Drunk in LA.” I was like, “What was that?” And he was like, “Oh, I just came up with that.” And I was just like, “Don’t forget it.” I was able to look at him like I was watching the concert—that’s another thing I’m in awe of. Even if I get really angry and upset sometimes, there are still surprises happening. I’m in awe of that.
VL: I would never dispute or say anything otherwise, because the whole point of making art is that you are building something out of love, and however anybody perceives that is their right. And so, for me, that is a beautiful thing. I hold my arms around that. That’s fucking awesome.
AS: People have often thought Victoria was gay or that I was gay in the context of the band. And I think that they’re picking up on something real, which is that our gender roles are pretty mixed. I just don’t think we exude a very normative vibe. Her voice is lower than mine when we record it. We are existing in a non-traditional zone of those roles, and everything is emitting from that. There’s a lot of reasons why someone might interpret openness in those worlds, and I’m glad that they interpret openness because that’s definitely how we feel.
[Scally leaves the room to pick up dinner.]
VL: I mean, look, we’re all humans. Physicality is part of everything, so I’m not going to say that there are not instances of physical interaction between the two of us. But will I call it a name? It’s tough. Any relationship, any commitment, is an intense learning experience, and I’m still learning about this one. I will say that this relationship is very complex, and that’s all I will say about that.
VL: Absolutely. My mother too. Some people have their moms as their best friends—I don’t have that. But my mother was like a mother and a father, she really is a force. As I rotate as a planet around the other planets, Alex is another major force in my life. And if you asked him the same thing, I think he would say that I am for him too.
