Beach House are a duo from Baltimore whose music is a gorgeous, languorous marriage of analogue organ chords, muffled drum-programming, sweeps of slide guitar, and the deep, doleful vocals of Victoria Legrand. Legrand, the niece of French film composer Michel Legrand, grew up splitting time between Paris and Philadelphia. In 2004, after completing her theatrical studies, Legrand moved to Baltimore, and met Alex Scally.

The duo started collaborating as Beach House, and, in 2006, released their debut, self-titled album on Carpark Records. Following its warm critical acclaim, the band released their second LP, Devotion, in 2008. Subsequent tours with with Fleet Foxes and Grizzly Bear helped raise their profile, and the band then signed with the venerable Sub Pop Records. To make their third album, Teen Dream, the band packed all their gear up and decamped to the woods of upstate New York with producer Chris Coady (a Dave Sitek understudy who's worked with Blonde Redhead, Celebration, and Architecture in Helsinki, among others). The result was an album far more electric and dynamic than either of its predecessors, one quickly anointed as one of 2010's best albums. Teen Dream was also released replete with a DVD featuring a video for every song on the album.

Interview: 15 January 2010

Your list of tour dates for 2010 is vaguely frightening. How does it feel looking at a slate of 64 dates in 17 countries?
“Well, luckily we love touring.

[laughs] That’s when you get to get into a rhythm, playing every night. It can be really fun. And I think you learn where you want to go with your music. When we were touring heavily for Devotion, we definitely stored up a lot of energy and ideas that we had. By the end of the touring cycle we couldn’t wait to get back home to start working on the next record. In some ways, touring is a restraint on the creative side, because it’s hard to write on the road. So you just have to wait, and sit on this anticipation until the time you’re able to spend days, weeks, months working on something. Basically, that’s what happened with Teen Dream.”

So, the album was months in the making?
“We had about nine months in which we wrote the record. Then, in June, we made demos of all the songs to give to the video artists [for the accompanying DVD], and finally we went to upstate New York and we recorded for a month.”

Have you long harboured a desire to make the grand visual interpretation of your music?
“The DVD idea was something that we’d had for a long time. We thought it’d be very exciting to have an album with a video for every song. Not a music video, with us in it, but a visual interpretation of music. And, then, it just grew more and more exciting, this idea of having all these different artists work with us. We knew everyone that we selected, but we hadn’t actually worked with most of them. And they’re not all necessarily people who would make music videos. So, we thought that would be a very interesting curation.”

You’ve spoken before about how you think of Beach House’s music as being visual. How different were other people’s interpretations of the visual qualities that you see in your music?
“Some were very different, and that makes it very exciting. Some were quite strange, and very imaginative. We had no creative control over them. We let them go and do whatever they wanted, and we didn’t make anybody change anything."

Was it a difficult thing relinquishing control?
“No, it was an exciting thing. Because you’re so inside of the music that you make, and you’re paying so much attention to it, and knowing that, while you’re doing that, other people are doing work too for the record, it’s a very invigorating feeling. It’s like the record is building in more ways than one, and all at the same time. It’s this something extra that will expand Beach House’s vocabulary.”

To expand your vocabulary?
“Well, moreso to expand the vocabulary of others. To get people using words other than ‘languid’ and ‘sleepy.’ There are a lot more words to use, I think, for this record. Like ‘sex.’”

So, befitting an album named Teen Dream, it’s about sex?
“Yeah, I think it’s more physical. I think there are different rhythms, new emotions, more dynamics. Less lo-fi, a little bit more hi-fi. Certain things are more clear. It feels more closer to you, more physical and intimate, and a little less of a fleeting record. The reason I said ‘sex’ is because, I think ‘Silver Soul’ is a very sexual song; a dark, intense, and moving song. But I could have just as easily said ‘hope.’ I think there are a lot of bigger, bolder words that could be brought up with this record. There’s a lot more life in it.”

This record, to me, sounds really different. The first two had a very thick, syrupy quality to them, this one sounds sparkling and crystalline.
“Yeah, just because of its hi-fi nature, this one is a lot more clear. In some ways, this record is the same as the others: we didn’t step outside of our boundaries, we didn’t get more instruments, or make a record that the two of us couldn’t play live. We didn’t go crazy like that. We just tried to build big songs out of very little material.”

How did you go about making the same small set-up sound bigger?
“Just by paying close attention to the sounds, and being very careful with the sounds. Not letting anything go that we weren’t sure of. There are parts of Devotion that we look back on and think ‘that could’ve been better.’ Like, ‘we didn’t quite get that drum sound.’ That didn’t happen on this record. We heard things, we went after them, and we made sure we got them. Chris Coady was very good at helping us get those sounds. Sometimes things come down to just getting the right microphone. When you have the time, you can make better decisions than you would if you only had two weeks to make your record.”

Next: "When I was a teenager, I pretty much dreamt about having a boy fall in love with me, wanting that really bad. Or just making out. I just laid around, listened to music a ton, and had my fantasies..."